Redes sociais como novo palco para o espetáculo na política: uma análise da construção de personagens políticos no Facebook antes e durante a campanha presidencial de 2018

Abstract

The advancement of technology is changing the relationship between Media and Politics. The internet and social networks have been consolidated as favorable environments for Political Propaganda before and during election campaigns. The idea is to emphasize this perception within the studies that involve the centrality of the media and how the Field of Communication became the primordial arena for political disputes. In this sense, our argument is based on the hypothesis that social networks have become consolidated as a field increasingly disputed by the Brazilian political actors, being used for the creation and consolidation of characters and for the realization of a Permanent Campaign. To do so, the study object in this analysis will be the content of the publications made in the official pages of four of the main candidates for the presidency of the republic in 2018 election, stem from the social network Facebook, before and during the election period. In particular: Jair Bolsonaro (PSL), Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), Fernando Haddad (PT) and Ciro Gomes (PDT). It was sought to find out "if" and "how" each of them made use of these tools to build political characters, and what strategies they adopted, both in the pre-campaign period and in the campaign period. The choice for this object, in particular, aligned within the debates about communication, power and cyberspace, is justified by the instability of the current political moment in Brazil and the relevance of observing, from the theoretical point of view, its unfolding. As a methodological approach, we used the Bardin Content Analysis (1977). From it, it was possible to analyze the objects separately at two different moments and to identify the points of convergence and divergence in the consolidation of the image that the candidates sought to construct in front of - and in the imaginary - of the voters. The result of the analysis made it possible to highlight personalistic and Permanent Campaign traits in the content disseminated by all the subjects analyzed, besides identifying some strategies used by each of them stem from their position in the political context in which they were inserted.