Producing Antipetismo : Media activism and the rise of the radical, nationalist right in contemporary Brazil

When examining the decline of the leftist Partido dos Trabalhadores and the ascension of the right-wing extremist Jair Bolsanaro of the far-right Partido Liberal Social to the 2018 presidency, political scientists David Samuels and Cesar Zucco have argued that this shift is best understood not through positive characteristics of Bolsonaro’s candidacy but through antipetismo ‘anti-PT-ism’, an intensely personal resentment of the Partido dos Trabalhadores. We assert that popular right-wing Facebook groups and networks formed around the communication network WhatsApp-fueled antipetismo by channeling anger originating in the 2013 nationwide protests away from a variety of social, political, and issues and toward a villainous depiction of Partido dos Trabalhadores leaders and valorization of anti-Partido dos Trabalhadores activists like Bolsanaro, as well as some focus on his own conservative, nationalist agenda. To interrogate this assertion, we propose two specific lines of research. The first is a qualitative textual analysis of the social media accounts of two of the most active anti-Partido dos Trabalhadores groups: Vem Pra Rua and O Movimento Brasil Livre. Through close reading of the materials distributed on these sites, we will illustrate how they channeled general unrest into a specifically partisan attack. The next line of research and case will be an examination of the role of mainstream news networks (namely TV Record) and WhatsApp by those campaigning for recently elected president Bolsonaro for a continued negative campaign against left candidates, specifically the Partido dos Trabalhadores, using fake news items like the supposed ‘gay kit’ that was being circulated in schools by the Partido dos Trabalhadores and others on the left to persuade children to become gay. When possible, we will analyze examples of the materials that were circulated that have emerged in the press coverage and will examine the processes that were used to target and persuade people to forward the materials created for the campaign.