During the 2022 Brazilian presidential electoral campaign, Bolsonaro adopted the strategy to address sexist and misogynistic attacks on female journalists. This study aims to analyze the overall discourse and narratives that emerged from those attacks and the overall sentiment among Twitter users.
This study analyzes 579,708 tweets mentioning three journalists targeted by Bolsonaro—Vera Magalhães, Gabriela Prioli, and Amanda Klein—between August 1 and October 31, 2022. We conducted a computational text analysis using R to examine the timeline of mentions and the most frequent words, and employed BERTopic modeling in Python, which clustered the tweets into distinct themes. Later, we conducted a sentiment analysis of the tweets and topics.
Results show a pattern in the reactions on social media, where these attacks not only targeted female journalists but also sought to discredit the professional press more broadly. Bolsonaro replicated the strategy of other authoritarian populist leaders worldwide, who engage in online harassment campaigns that label journalists as "enemies of the people" (Carlson et al., 2021).