#AoIR 2nd Flashpoint Symposium 2020

2018 presidential elections in Brazil gained notoriety by an aggressive radicalization and a strong polarization between left and right-wing – similar to that observed in Brazilian political scene in last decades, but with recent upsurge in far-right sectors. It is an ideal scenario for strategic circulation not only of fake news, but of content whose main purpose is to damage adversary's public image, the so-called negative campaign (Geer, 2006; Borba, 2012). Add to that a no less relevant set of peculiarities of this last election, such as the attack suffered by then-candidate Jair Bolsonaro, and his subsequent alleged impossibility to participate in televised debates with other candidates, which resulted in an atypical campaign, in which the main postulant to the Presidency had very little television time to carry his propaganda and relied almost entirely on a model of digital campaign with strong appeal to mobile communication networks and social media. That said, the two candidates who went to the second round had an intense face off through their official profiles and through the press.