Uma busca de credibilização no YouTube: a gestão de pontos de vista sobre questões da covid-19 como estratégia argumentativa em vídeos de débunkage em divulgação científica

Abstract

During the covid-19 pandemic period, Brazil experienced the need not only to fight the coronavirus, but also to deal with disinformation on this topic in sociodigial networks. As Massarani, Costa and Brotas (2021) point out, this disinformation has a destructive potential on democracy and public health. It is in the face of antagonism of positions of this scenario, leading to a reliability crisis (infodemic), and therefore, it is in the face of a polemic dialogicity that certain scientific youtubers have developed a sort of resistance. Organized in a sort of portal for reliability on YouTube (the ScienceVlogs Brazil, SVBr), these youtubers published videos that aimed to correct false information and counteract to the promotion of anti-scientific thinking; that is, these are débunkage videos, under the terms of Baur (2021): videos that seek to deconstruct the opponent’s view. To understand how these scientific disseminators position themselves in the face of the pandemic polemics, we chose, as the subject of the analysis of the discourse proposed here, two videos from two channels of scientific publicizing (SP) hosted on YouTube/SVBr. Thus, the overall aim of this analysis is to verify how the discourse of the youtubers works as a way of credibilizing themselves and science, when determining themselves in relation to opposing positions. For this, we examine the management of internal dialogism of videos – the management of points of view (POVs) made by youtuber –, identifying, in the marks of this management, the argumentative objectives (visées argumentatives) for the building credibility of the scientific point of view. That being said, the research uses the theoretical categories of Rabatel (2016a), taking the arrangements of the relationship between POVs (the forms of agreement, disagreement and neutrality between povs) of videotext (monogerious text). These categories operate as indications of indirect and emotional argumentation (Rabatel, 2018; Pinto; Cortez, 2017). The modalization of the points of view mobilized in these intra-discursive scenes is verified in the light of Desclés (2009). As the enunciative pacts support pragmatic conditions and the external places of discourse, congruent to interpretative effects (Emediato, 2020), we intersect the mentioned analysis with notions of Charaudeau (2010; 2016) and Flores and Medeiros (2018), for example, which concern the SP scenographies that are indexed by the enunciative marks of the text. The corpus was prepared with the transcription of videos based on the conventions of Jefferson (1984). The resulting texts were segmented, considering both the rhetorical macrostructure and the textual progression, aiming at the cotextualization of the occurrences. The analysis deals primarily with the argumentative premises, then goes to other stages, more focused on informational/textual segments, whose phenomena are grouped in thematic axes, by analogy-homology. The results of the investigation, proving the enunciative simulations of SP performed by youtuber, show scenographic strategies of slowdown, and not only of assertiveness of the veridictory authority of science: the slowdown takes place, for example, through concessions to the perspective and emotions of the science deniers, either in the operations of prise en charge of the scientific POV or in that adversary POV. Actually, such scenographies given in the configuration of POVs are made up of emotions argued indirectly, as joy/comedy and indignation, as ways to make the public believe the reasonableness of science in debate.