Estratégias de deslegitimação dos atos antidemocráticos de 8 de janeiro na comunicação de deputados federais bolsonaristas de Mato Grosso no Instagram

Abstract

This study focuses on the digital communication of federal deputies elected by Mato Grosso who support Bolsonaro, with the aim of understanding how these lawmakers constructed and disseminated their stance on the antidemocratic events of January 8th on Instagram. We start from the hypothesis that the deputies mobilized strategies to downplay the seriousness of the events and delegitimize their investigation in a narrative dispute divorced from reality, relying on rhetorical resources and discursive marks characteristic of right-wing populist communication. For data collection, we chose the period from January 8th to September 11th, 2023, encompassing the date of the events and a significant portion of the work of the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission established in the National Congress to investigate the facts. To construct the corpus, the digital platforms “Fanpage Karma” and “4K Strogram” were used, totaling 2117 posts, of which 187 became part of our corpus. The material was analyzed based on a qualitative content analysis, through which we identified three strategies for delegitimizing the events: "Normalization of the events on January 8th," "Subversion of reality and accountability" and "Deconstruction of the work of the commission." The preliminary analysis of the data indicates that all the lawmakers disseminated content with strategies that converge towards downplaying the seriousness of January 8th and delegitimizing the investigation work of the commission. The results lead us to conclude that the representatives from Mato Grosso in the Federal Chamber acted as a cohesive group that complements each other,, producing a discourse with disinformation bias, aiming to disseminate content on social networks that offer an alternative, and disconnected from reality, about the serious attack on Brazilian democracy.