The Right-Wing In The 2022 Presidential Elections

Analysis Of The Informative Flow Through Urls And Rts On Twitter

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss the distribution of information governed by right-wing profiles in the digital environment. Faced with the growing increase of right-wing politicians and citizen activists who produce and share information through social media, the study has as its starting point the fact that these actors have been organizing mostly through online platforms, which are an important channel of their form of organization. In addition, social media has been used as a disintermediated space to speak to citizens. Thus, for the analysis, the object is the URLs and RTs shared by 10 accounts of right-wing representatives on Twitter, framed as: i) activists, ii) politicians and iii) impersonal pages of right-wing activism, during the 2022 electoral period. Altogether, 1,429 tweets out of a total of 3,590 published by the profiles in the period were manually coded from Content Analysis. After this categorization, an investigation was carried out with the objective of analyzing the connection between the original authors of the pages and the presence of retweets and tweets that included links. To this end, a chi-square test, appropriate for categorical variables, and Cramer's V test were used, in order to understand the relationship between the variables under analysis. The data indicate that there is a difference in the intensity of the use of links and new voices take shape in the propagation of right-wing content online, sharing mainly information from Twitter itself through pages of right-wing politicians.