The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is the great Bruna Paroni, whose focus is on visual political communication on Instagram during Brazil’s 2024 local elections. These took place two years after the deeply polarising presidential elections, and the subsequent Bolsonarist coup attempt; the focus of the present study is especially on how these elections unfolded in São Paulo with its population of nine million registered voters.
In preparation, the Brazilian Electoral Court had made arrangements with several major platform providers to safeguard the elections, and indeed this led one mayoral candidate to be suspended several times from Facebook for posting false information. However, this suspension was only partial, and his problematic content remained available on the platform nonetheless.
The election therefore points to symptoms of destructive polarisation, and this can affect public opinion formation; visual political communication is especially critical and persuasive in this context, and needs to be studied in greater detail. How did São Paulo candidates perform on Instagram during these local elections, then? What trends in visibility and engagement emerged over time, and what factors drove these trends?
The project gathered some 7,500 Instagram posts from five mayoral candidates from August to October 2024; this activity was very unevenly distributed across the candidates. Most posts were video content, and indeed the three accounts of the twice-suspended candidate Pablo Marçal was the most active candidate by a substantial margin, and also received the highest number of views, likes, and comments for this content. Indeed, as one Marçal account was suspended, the next simply took over.
Such forms of engagement are also related to each other. Each 1% increase in likes related to roughly 0.44% more views, and each 1% in comments relates to roughly 0.25% more views, but the curve also flattens out towards the end – already large numbers no longer increase substantially after some time.
Candidate identity thus strongly shapes views; Marçal in particular strongly dominated. Other aspects (content type, timing, follower count, posting frequency) matter much less, and offline contexts such as major campaign events largely drive online engagement. There is thus an unequal distribution of voice and attention on the online space, but the direction of causality between visibility and attention is not yet clear.
