Ministério da Saúde no facebook: um estudo de caso das políticas de informação no perfil institucional

Abstract

The growth of social networks on the internet is visible. Everywhere you can see people using these tools on various places, either via desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone. In Brazil, the most prominent network in recent years is Facebook, which reached 76 million users in June 2013, an unprecedented number in the country. Such a growth made possible for governments to perceive this virtual space as a potential place of presentation of their work and to communicate with the society. But how these relationships are established and what are the influences exerted by public policy information on this process? In order to analyse such relationships, we chose the Facebook page of the Health Ministry of Brazil. The aim is to observe how information has been publicized by the Ministry through this social network and evaluate the use of this network since 2010 (year of creation of the page) up to today, in order to propose a discussion of the democratization of access to health information.