Eleições 2.0: o uso das redes sociais digitais durante as Eleições Suplementares ao Governo do Estado do Amazonas

Abstract

The transformation of material culture into postmodern societies has made the clinging between society and technology a source for new social phenomena which emerge in the contemporary world. From the last third of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was noted that technology came to be the own fabric in which human activities occur and not only as something external or alien to society. In this regard, the use Internet resources in electoral campaigns has become increasingly relevant, the formation of emblematic political scenarios in various electoral contexts has reconfigured strategies not only between candidates and parties, but among all political actors involved in the electoral process. The massive use of the new communication platforms has made possible new political experiences which can lead to the expansion of the debate to the political participation of civil society in the issues of the Res-publica. With the intention of understanding the insertion of the new social technologies in the contemporary electoral campaigns, this research aimed to analyze the use of the social network Facebook during the elections to supplement the government of the Amazonas state at 2017. The research contemplated two investigative scopes: the first aimed to verify the use of Facebook as a campaign tool by the political class. In order to do that, it was collected posts from the official pages of the candidates during the first round of the electoral campaign seeking to identify the communication strategies used by the political class to reach the electorate in the virtual environment. For the treatment of the data (posts) from the pages, it was decided to use the Quantitative Content Analysis, since this search identifies patterns / correlations from a large number of data. For the categorization of the postings, it was used the codebook developed by Massuchin and Tavares, which deals with the main political strategies employed by candidates in the virtual environment. The second scope of the research, analyzed the democratic potential of network communication. To do this, an online questionnaire was applied in order to examine the extent of the Facebook's use as a platform for political interaction among voters in the Amazonas state during the electoral process. The results indicated that the Facebook as well as other virtual social networks were widely used by both candidates and voters during the supplementary elections. In relation to the candidates’ use, it was verified the predominance of communication strategies already used in the traditional Electoral Propaganda. The candidates used the Facebook and others digital social networks as an extension of the campaign spread in traditional media with timid innovative initiatives in view of the resources of the new distributed communication platforms. Regarding the use made by the voters, the results obtained through the online questionnaire allowed to infer that the political interactions woven in the virtual environment during the electoral period of the supplementary elections occurred between the own users of the network and not from the candidates’ pages. However, the postings of the candidates had great repercussion in view of the inadvertent exposure in digital social networks.