Superparticipants in the Brazilian Impeachment Debate on Twitter

The next speaker at AoIR 2018 is Gabriela Zago, who shifts our focus to the prevalence of ‘fake news’ in Brazilian politics; she is looking especially at the use of Twitter in the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. Twitter is an important social medium in Brazil, and especially features many social influencers including politicians, journalists, and celebrities.

The impeachment process showed considerable political polarisation between the left and the right in Brazil; while many on the left supported the President, the right actively supported impeachment. Crucial to the debate on social media were superparticipants: highly active users who may be understood as fans or anti-fans of the specific politicians involved.

The project studied these participants by collecting tweets containing the term ‘impeachment’ across a number of dates during the impeachment debate; it conducted social network analysis of the communication networks between participating accounts and engaged in a qualitative analysis of the major nodes in the network.

On the major dates during which the impeachment debate flared up, strong polarisation between the participants became obvious; the participants with the greatest outdegree can be seen as activists who are increasing the polarisation of the network, and their engagement with the debate remained broadly stable across the three dates investigated.

These political superparticipants posted very frequently (up to 300 posts per day); retweeted accounts with aligned political views; showed their own allegiance through their usernames or profile information; and posted negative messages about the opposing camp – all patterns that are well-known from fandom communities, too. Through their actions they shaped the networks of political communication on Twitter, by connecting other participants more closely through retweets and @mentions.

The next question is now how this plays out in the current Brazilian presidential election, which is even more extremely polarised than the debate around Dilma’a impeachment.