Patterns of Asymmetrical Polarisation in Brazil

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Felipe Soares, whose focus is on asymmetric polarisation on Facebook in Brazil. He begins by noting the difficulty in defining polarisation, given the wide range of definitions available in the literature, and points to our work at QUT in developing the concept of destructive polarisation as a way to determine whether the polarisation that we might observe in any given context is in fact a problem at all.

Further, polarisation is often observed to be asymmetric, with one side of politics considerably more extreme than the other. This has been the case in the US in recent years, but similar political dynamics have also been observed in Brazil – especially in the recent presidential contest between incumbent far-right president Jair Bolsonaro and his left-wing challenger Luis Inácio Lula da Silva.

This project gathered data from CrowdTangle during the run-off election contest in October 2022, gathering public Facebook posts containing the names of the two contenders. Its analysis focusses especially on the Facebook pages and the URLs they shared, which produced a highly bipolar network that contained clusters supporting one or the other candidate.

Pro-Bolsonaro pages predominantly shared social media content, and (less so) mainstream and partisan media links; pro-Lula pages predominantly shared mainstream media and only very few social media links. Pro-Bolsonaro social media content was largely in the form of Instagram videos from far-right figures promoting Bolsonaro and disseminating disinformation about Lula.

This indicates the presence of asymmetrical polarisation in Brazil; what is being shared by the two sides does not match up, and the differences in the sources being relied on point to some very different communicative approaches.