The digital ecosystem in the 2020 municipal elections in Brazil: the buzz of distrust in the electoral system on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter

Abstract

This research analyzes the flux of content and narrative axis that support the lack of trust on the Brazilian electoral system. The study is based on a corpus of 1,426,687 posts published on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter between the days of November 1st and November 30th, period that comprised the municipal elections of 2020 in Brazil. Through structured linguistic rules, we collected content regarding fraud in the ballots, vulnerability of the electronic ballots, farse and electoral manipulation, acute defense of paper ballots, among others, provided from these three social media platforms. The analysis is divided in two parts: the first one examines the evolution of the publications in the electoral month, and the second examines the narrative networks that amplify this kind of debate in digital environments. This document is more of an effort in the sense of understanding the scenario of disorder and informative manipulation with anti-systematic and conspiratorial qualities that have been emerging in the online public sphere and supported processes of public opinion distortion in Brazil, especially in electoral contexts.