Bolsonaro and Salles' digital speech on covid-19, the Amazon and indigenous peoples during the first year of the pandemic in Brazil

Abstract

In this research, we investigate technodiscursive resources mobilized by Jair Bolsonaro, as President of the Republic, as well as by the then Minister of the Environment, Ricardo Salles, about COVID-19, the Amazon, and indigenous peoples, published on Twitter/X, during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic in Brazil (from March 11, 2020 to March 11, 2021). Our objective is to identify and analyze the characteristics of the digital discourse practiced by the subjects in question to enunciate themselves, as political figures, on this social network, considering the prominent role of the aforementioned platform for modern political debate. In view of this, we base ourselves on Digital Discourse Analysis (Paveau), from an ecological and post-dualist perspective, methodologically supporting ourselves in a qualitative analysis based on the notion of small corpus, advocated by Moirand (2020). In view of the above, this study concludes that the technodiscourse promoted by Bolsonaro and Salles on Twitter/X expressed openly anti-scientific and denialist positions on the aforementioned topics, revealing a digital discourse ideologically marked by conservatism and little appreciation for public institutions. We also found that both publicly expressed opposition to the preservation of biomes and the maintenance of indigenous lives.