“If it can’t harm, why do not take it?”: A study on the bolsonarist pro-chloroquine disinformation campaign

• Autor(a) principal: Lima, João Paulo Eufrazio de
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista Linguagem em Foco (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://revistas.uece.br/index.php/linguagememfoco/article/view/9356
• topic: Desinformação; Cloroquina; Bolsonaro; Disinformation; Chloroquine; Bolsonaro

The aim of this article was to analyze the disinformation campaign promoted by the Brazilian Federal Government in favor of the use of Chloroquine as part of the so-called “early treatment” against Covid-19. Therefore, we analyze the mentions to the treatment with Chloroquine made by the President of the Republic, Jair Messias Bolsonaro, mainly in his lives on Youtube. To verify the reachability of these presidential speeches, we sought to correlate the referred lives to the search indexes for the keyword “chloroquine” on the Google search site, through the Google Trends tool. The data obtained demonstrate that it is possible to establish a relationship between the mentions made to Chloroquine by the President of the Republic and the significant increase in the search for this term on the Google search site. In addition, the high recurrence of the discourse in favor of the so-called “early treatment” indicates that there was also a disinformation campaign orchestrated in order to deceive or confuse the public opinion with serious consequences yet to be investigated.