And the afternoon session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno starts with Maria José Ávalos Troncoso, whose focus is on women political candidates in Chile. Two of the eight candidates in the first round of the Chilean presidential elections in 2025 were women; one of them, Jara, made it to the run-off election against the eventual winner, Kast.
The question is, then, how she was treated during the election campaign; role congruity theory, gendered disinformation, platformised bias, and the continuum of political violence all predict that she would be treated differently from her opponent(s) because she is a woman. This might also be shaped by platform affordances, here on Facebook and Instagram.
This project gathered data from both platforms between August 2025 and January 2026, sampling 269,000 posts from some 122 monitored accounts down to 710 posts selected for manual coding. These were coded for their delegitimisation tactics, focussing on both generic and gendered tactics.
Some 58% of these posts contained attacks, roughly evenly balancing attacks on male and female targets; female candidates were more frequently targetted by gendered attacks, however, by a factor of five. These especially emphasised diminuitive characteristics, addressed their appearance, or hystericised or domesticated them. Such attacks erase women candidates from the electoral race, while other, more generic attacks engage and provide a platform to respond.
