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Informational co-option against democracy: comparing Bolsonaro's discourses about voting machines with the public debate

Published: 20 November 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Introduction: Faced with a third wave of autocratization, 'what are the characteristics and discursive relationships between the speeches of President Bolsonaro and the main attacks on electronic voting machines between 2019 and 2022?', seeking to find relationships for a theoretical and empirical debate on the third wave. There is an approach that goes through the use of the communicational power made available by the ownership of the Institutions to co-opt civil society. Materials and Methods: Web scraping techniques are used to extract 1.) all Bolsonaro's tweets, 2.) all false Bolsonaro speeches and 3.) the main fake news verified between 2019 and 2022, creating five categories. Results: 183 attacks by Bolsonaro against electronic voting machines and 270 main fake news in the same period are classified. Clear similarities are pointed out between the fake news and Bolsonaro's speeches. Discussions: 'Disinformation as an instrument of para-institutional co-option' is based. Conclusions: It points to a research agenda that relates studies a context of the use of social media and digital platforms in government activities by their leaders, including communication, engagement strategies, and initiatives. Additionally, the study explores the impacts of digital media on democracy and citizens' co-option.

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  1. Informational co-option against democracy: comparing Bolsonaro's discourses about voting machines with the public debate

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    ICEGOV '23: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance
    September 2023
    509 pages
    ISBN:9798400707421
    DOI:10.1145/3614321
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Publication History

    Published: 20 November 2023

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    Author Tags

    1. Case study
    2. Disinformation
    3. Elections
    4. Electronic voting machines
    5. Fake news
    6. Institutional communication
    7. Political communication
    8. Social Media

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    • Refereed limited

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    • National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq)

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    ICEGOV 2023

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