Análise de propagandas eleitorais antecipadas no Twitter

Abstract

Electoral advertising are an essential part of an election. The popularization of online social networks has offered a promising way for candidates to communicate with the electorate at large. In fact, the use of these applications to share electoral ads has already being pointed out, even outside the period allowed by Brazilian law. Yet, fighting this practice is hampered by the lack of a broader knowledge about the characteristics of this type of content, which allows effective detection solutions. This study aims to contribute to this knowledge through a broad characterization of the textual content associated with a set of early electoral advertisements shared on Twitter in pre-election periods associated with recent elections in Brazil (2016, 2018 and 2020). Our main findings are that ads tend to have a negative or neutral sentiment, a certain constant structure and more than half tend to explicitly mention a candidate or party to be chosen or avoided.