Bolsonaro's hate network: From the fringes to the presidency

Abstract

This chapter discusses the origins, development, and characteristics the hate network built around the President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro. How is it structured? How does it work? What factors have allowed it to exist? How does it affect the health of Brazilian democracy? It argues that Bolsonaro’s followers took advantage from an institutional crisis taking place in the late 2010s. At that time, the legacy media provided a massive coverage associating PT (Workers' Party), which was ahead of the presidency, to corruption, thus fostering a hate campaign against it. In that scenario, Bolsonaro emerged as the leader of the far-right opposition to PT. His followers firstly built a network on Facebook, using fake profiles and mixing hate speech with humor. Coordinated unofficially by several cabinet staff members, this network articulates the official profiles of the Bolsonaro family to followers and sympathizers and a vast array of anonymous supporting pages. This structure allowed Bolsonaro's activists to blur the boundaries between official and spurious discourses, and powered a series of flaming wars against political adversaries and reporters perceived as hostile to Bolsonaro's interests.