Twitter in Brazil: Discourses on China in Times of Coronavirus

Abstract

The health crisis caused by the new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) exposes latent social tensions arising from the process of globalization. The battle for the history of the responsibility for the crisis opens new fronts in which, thanks to social media, the public seems to be actively engaged. The first case of coronavirus in Brazil was confirmed in February, followed by a rapid increase in cases, news, and discourses on social media. Against this background, this article analyzes the use of Twitter by Portuguese-speaking users and the production of discourses on the new coronavirus in the face of political tensions between Brazil and China. We conducted a time series study of tweets posted during the period 19 March to 1 April 2020, retrieving 1.6 million tweets. The data was filtered in three stages and thematic and sentiment analysis was performed across the data set. The findings reaffirm the potential of social media as a tool for better understanding discourses produced during pandemics and reveal weaknesses in the governance of Twitter, where tweets using the term “Chinese virus” expose underlying racism and negative sentiment brought to the surface by current tensions between Brazil and China.

Keywords: coronavirus, Twitter, Brazil, China, discourses.