As metáforas da Covid-19 e o medo do estrangeiro no Facebook Brasil

Abstract

This article aims to map the illness metaphors (Sontag, 1988) that arise during the onset of an illness based on the actors and narratives that circulated most during the outbreak of COVID-19 in Brazil. To achieve this, we collected the words “China” and “Wuhan” using the CrowdTangle tool from public pages on Facebook from January 20 to 29, 2020, the period of the disease’s outbreak backlash in Brazil, which had its first cases emerge in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. We started with a bibliographical review on fear, a common effect in the emergence of other illnesses. In the empirical part, we found that the illness metaphor (Sontag, 1988) that emerged in January 2020 was a narrative that pointed to the emergence of a mysterious virus, the “Chinese virus,” which could be correlated to the country’s strange eating habits. Thus, previously existing anti-China sentiment was heightened in the platform society (Van Dijck, Poell, Waal) in the first month of the spread of COVID-19 in the world and was fomented by the press, the main actor in the period