A CONTROVÉRSIA WEINTRAUB:

Atores, traços digitais e posicionamentos políticos no Twitter

Abstract

In order to understand the behavior and the ideological positioning of users who participate in political conflicts on Twitter, we investigated the discursive interactions on the platform on 06/18/2020 on the resignation of the then Minister of Education of the federal government Abraham Weintraub. Our strategy was to analyze 100 profiles of users who participated in what we call the “Weintraub controversy” on Twitter, using the term “weintraub” as a reference. The 50 user profiles that produced the most retweeted tweets and the 50 user profiles that produced tweets that had the most comments were selected. We investigated the digital traces of the profiles in order to understand whether they offer information about the positioning of users in this controversy and also their ideological positioning. The results show that: (i) younger influencers are more retweeted and older politicians are more commented; (ii) most of the tweets retweeted and commented expressed support for Weintraub; (iii) users ideologically aligned to the right positioned themselves differently from each other, which indicates an internal division in this field; (iv) the ideologically aligned users on the left who took a stand on the conflict were all opposed to Weintraub. The results obtained in this research corroborate the usefulness and relevance of the digital trace analysis method, as it allows to understand other dimensions of social and political phenomena on digital platforms that are inscrutable by more traditional methods, such as network analysis.