Assault on power in Brazil: Jair Bolsonaro’s popularity collapses on social media

The former president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro reached on the internet its lowest level of popularity of the past four years after the attacks on institutions of power this Sunday in Brasilia by their supporters, according to the prestigious Digital Popularity Index (IPD). Experts attribute this to a possible fracture at its base.

The indicator, calculated daily by the research and consultancy firm Quaest and published by the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper, records that the far-right former president has 21 points – out of a maximum of 100-, 19 points less than the figure recorded on Saturday, one day before the attack.

According to IPD, the balance of attacks on the three state powers in the federal capital it was bad for the former president in a field favorable to him, the virtual one, and can indicate a fracture in Bolsonaro’s base and also uncertainty about the leader’s mobilizing potential.

The peak of popularity of the then president, who would have been hospitalized this Monday in the United States for abdominal pains, was recorded on October 7, between the first and second presidential rounds, when he reached 88.1 points, the best score since when the index became daily, in January 2019.

The São Paulo newspaper had already predicted a decline in Bolsonaro’s results since his defeat against President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who scored around 70 points in the popularity tracking system in the first days of his mandate.

According to Felipe Nunes, director of Quaest and professor of quantitative methods at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), this loss of influence on social networks constitutes a significant defeat for Bolsonaro, a political leader emerged and consolidated in the public space, precisely in the virtual environment.

How the Popularity Index is calculated

IPD is calculated using an artificial intelligence algorithm which collects and processes 152 variables from data platforms Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Wikipedia and Google.

Five variables are weighted into the final score: fame (number of followers), engagement (comments and likes per post), mobilization (retweets and shared comments), valence (percentage of positive and negative reactions), and interest (search volume ). .

The weight of each of these dimensions in the account is determined by a machine assimilated model based on the real results of previous elections, with thousands of candidates monitored.

According to Nunes, who is also a political scientist, Bolsonaro’s reaction after the defeat, marked by a long silence Broken only by unclear statements to his followers and his abrupt trip to the United States before the end of his term, he significantly divided the capital he owned in the digital space.

On the other hand, according to Nunes, “the news shows that if the objective of the demonstrations carried out after the defeat was to undermine the popularity and governance of President Lula, what actually happened is that they undermined the credibility of Bolsonarismo making it difficult for the work of the opposition, which is now associated with those events,” he said.

Even so, the detailed analysis of the data that make up the IPD, allows us to conclude that the far right maintains considerable strength in criteria such as fame and mobilizationbut it is particularly weak in terms of valence, which is the balance between positive and negative reactions to its interventions.

“It means his image is more negative because there are more negative comments about him. And also because it can’t, or won’t, produce a more coordinated articulation. In short, he loses an asset that was very important to him,” she said.

On the day of the state attacks on Brazil’s tri-power headquarters, Bolsonaro took to Twitter ambiguous comments. He, in a sense, condemned the events, but his position it should have been more unambiguousobserved Nunes.

“Bolsonaro’s base today is cracked, and dividing the base means a loss. Every time, during the electoral campaign, Bolsonaro radicalized his speech, his popularity fell. Now, with his name associated with the events in Brasilia, he ends up be damaged in the digital collection”, concluded the expert.

Agencies

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