Fake news pra cima de todos, vacina depois de tudo : estratégias de comunicação pública e de desinformação em tempos de pandemia.

Abstract

The main of the present work was to observe and analyze, based on the notions of Public Communication and disinformation, the positions and information made available on a social network by the Ministry of Health and the President of the Republic, Jair Bolsonaro, on facing the covid-19 pandemic, guided by the public interest. We are particularly interested in understanding how public communication operates in the contemporary context of disinformation, becoming an important agent in combating or disseminating false information. In this way, we observe in the official profiles of the Ministry of Health (@minsaude) and of President Jair Bolsonaro (@jairbolsonaro) on Twitter, if and how public communication was produced to deal with false information in posts about covid-19, by through the methodology of content analysis, according to Bardin (2016). The corpus was composed of posts about measures to combat the coronavirus, including vaccination, on the aforementioned Twitter profiles, according to the following periods: 1st moment) March 11, 2020 (when the WHO decreed that the spread of the coronavirus became a pandemic due to its geographic distribution in the world) until April 11, 2020; 2nd moment) between January 17th and February 17th, 2021, which was the first month of the vaccination campaign against covid-19; and 3rd moment) from July 8 to August 8, 2021, during the last month of the covid-19 CPI in the Federal Senate. From our data, we conclude the action of the Ministry of Health in relation to misinformation was very limited, with a very small volume of posts addressing the issue. The Ministry of Health, as well as Bolsonaro, used public communication strategies that valued the dissemination of government actions in the face of the pandemic. This demonstrates an informational aspect in the characteristic of public communication, which little explores strategies and platform affordances to develop communication from a relational paradigm.