Shifts in Political Polarisation on Facebook in Post-Bolsonaro Brazil

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Bruns Paroni, whose focus is on information campaigns on social media in post-Bolsonaro Brazil. Her work builds on our QUT research into destructive political polarisation, which amongst others identifies a breakdown of communication as a symptom of such destructive polarisation. Such breakdown might manifest as an absence of communication between opposing sides, and this is difficult to identify empirically if all we have is trace data about active communication processes.

This project focusses on comments, ‘love’ and ‘angry’ reactions, and shares on Facebook as indicators of affective polarisation on Facebook; it asks whether patterns in such interactions remain stable before and after Bolsonaro’s election loss, and centres on some 59 coordinated Facebook accounts that promoted Bolsonaro. It examines some 12 million posts by these accounts between 2021 and 2023.

Patterns in the ratios between love and angry, and between comments and shares, are largely stable in the pre-election period (except for some momentary outbreaks of instability), but change considerably after the coup attempt on 8 January 2023 – the ratios notably shift here towards comments and angry reactions, respectively.

The 100 most engaged posts from these pro-Bolsonaro groups were further examined here, and unsurprisingly pro-Bolsonaro engagement bait emerged as especially prominent before 2023; after the election, pro-Lula mockery emerged prominently, too, as more Lula supporters posted into these pro-Bolsonaro groups to mock them. Several other categories also shifted in their prominence.