The Disinformation Discourse about COVID-19’s cure on Twitter: A case study

Abstract

This paper analyzes how the circulation of disinformation regarding a possible “cure” for coronavirus on Brazilian Twitter took place in a period of ten days in March 2020. Our focus is the discussion of  (1) how discourses related to disinformation about alleged cures were spread, (2) the different types of disinformation discourse and their prevalence and (3) the discursive disputes against other discourses that deny this disinformation. Through a mixed methods study, using both content analysis and social network analysis of 57.295 tweets, we observed: (1) the alignment of the disinformation discourse with the political discourse of support of the President of the Republic, Jair Bolsonaro, mostly by the actions of opinion leaders aligned with his support base; (2) the growth of disinformation circulation based on the president's speeches; (3) the circulation of misleading framing as the key disinformation strategy, seeking to connect the “cure” discourse with disinformation.