#VACHINA: How Politicians Help to Spread Disinformation About COVID-19 Vaccines

• DOI: 10.33621/jdsr.v4i1.112
• Publication Date: 2022-02-09T08:01:14Z
• Authors: Raquel Recuero; Felipe Bonow Soares
• Keywords: Social sciences (General); H1-99; disinformation; covid-19; social media; Media studies; anti-vaccine; Linguistics; discourse; 3. Good health

This paper focuses on how Brazilian politicians helped to spread disinformation about Covid-19 vaccines, discussing legitimation strategies and actors that played a significant role on Twitter and Facebook. Based on data gathered through CrowdTangle and Twitter API, we selected the 250 most shared/retweeted posts for each dataset (n=500) and examined if they contained disinformation, who posted it, and what strategy was used to legitimize this discourse. Our findings indicate that politicians and hyperpartisan accounts have a key influence in validating the Brazilian president’s populist discourse through rationalization (pseudo-science) and denunciation (against the vaccine). The political frame also plays an important role in disinformation messages.