The negative Facebook campaign of the presidential candidates in the 2018 elections

Abstract

This article analyzes the use of negative campaign on the social network Facebook by the five main candidates for the Presidency of Brazil during the 2018 election, comparing the use, relevance and predominant strategies in the use of the social network. The research was carried out through the collection of posts by the Netvizz application, being 1,678 during the first round and 162 posts in the second round, totaling 1,840. First, through Aggio's (2011) grid, these posts were classified into 11 categories, one of which is the negative campaign. Then, based on the typology proposed by Steibel (2005), only the negative posts were analyzed, in order to understand who the targets were, what types of negative campaigns (attack, criticism and comparison) were carried out and what was the space of the negative campaign within each candidate's campaign. The results indicate that the negative campaign was little used in the first round due to the large number of candidates and to avoid the "boomerang effect", in the second round the use was greater and that it focused mostly on personal aspects to the detriment of political aspects.