Facebook as space for radicalism on the Internet: An analysis of comments by users during the 2014 elections in Brazil

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss the radicalization of political and electoral debate in social network sites, in Brazil. Thus, we analyse the comments published by Facebook users on three national newspapers’ pages. We codified 628.057 comments published during all the 2014 electoral period. The specific variables analyzed were the kind of comment (critic or support) and the tendency to radicalization. By them, we could observe how people who comment behaved and debated about politics in that period, previously to the elections. The hypotheses are that 1) there is a large presence of radicalization on the debate, but this happens distinctly in relation to each candidate’s mention and the radical critics are more directed to the incumbent.