Expanded Advertising and Memetic Culture: Chloroquine as a Communication Object in the COVID-19 Pandemic

The article analyzes how chloroquine packaging was mobilized as a visual sign in the memes that circulated on Twitter during the first half of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. This is an excerpt from the doctoral thesis defended in November 2024, at the Institute of Social Medicine at UERJ, in which chloroquine was addressed as a symbolic artifact, crossed by narrative and political disputes. The study reflects on the ways in which medicine is made visible and its aestheticization on social networks through internet memes, tensioning the boundaries between science, advertising, digital culture, politics and communication. The qualitative analysis was guided by the methodological proposal of Sampaio and Lycarião (2021), based on thematic coding and meme content analysis, allowing us to observe how the visuality of the chloroquine packaging became a political-ideological language in the digital environment and a form of expanded advertising (Machado et al., 2017).