Pirralha e raivosa : a desmoralização de Greta Thunberg como estratégia desmobilizadora do ativismo climático

Abstract

“Brat”, girl with “anger management problem”, “Justin Bieber of Ecology”: these are some attacks aimed at climate activist Greta Thunberg. Since she had notoriety in the media, the young Swedish has been bothering political leaders, such as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and former US President Donald Trump, by reinforcing the governments' inertia in combating global warming. The attacks are uttered publicly, in newspapers or on social media, amplifying the discourse that demoralizes Thunberg. This work aims to investigate how these attacks are incorporated into the dynamics of public opinion. We also assess the extent to which audiences are influenced by the utterpositions of great leaders and what impacts these personal attacks have on an activist and on her cause debates. We rely on the concept and nature of the ad hominem argument, a rhetorical resource whose objective is to attack the credibility of an interlocutor in front of the audience, in order to understand this mechanism. After surveying the main meanings triggered by leaders and journalists to attack the activist, we verified whether the same meanings are used by Twitter users. To do so, we analyzed 1.547 tweets that mention @GretaThunberg in the period December 10 to 12, 2019, a time interval in which Jair Bolsonaro called the activist a “brat” (“pirralha”) and Donald Trump expressed disapproval at seeing the young woman being chosen as Personality of the Year by the american magazine Time. By analyzing the dynamics of attacks, we identified the following demoralization mechanisms: reproduction of meanings triggered by authorities and creation of new meanings, demoralization extended to the publics, exploitation of temporality, attack customization and crossdemoralization. They contribute to impoverish the debate around the climate cause, which can contribute to demobilization.