Mapping comments and feelings on Jair Bolsonaro’s Instagram profile about Covid-19

Abstract

The use of social networks as a communication channel by political personalities to citizens has become an effective reality, including its exploration as a mechanism for forming opinions or even as a tool for promoting positions or actions. This paper proposes the conduction of an analysis through Controversy Cartography on a set of comments from followers of Brazilian president Jair Messias Bolsonaro’s Instagram official profile, specifically on publications related to Covid-19. The applied methodology is based on the use of intelligent computational solutions, from the extraction of data to the generation of information visualizations, which are the basis for the presented considerations. The results demonstrate a polarization of opinions that revolve around themes such as religiosity and nationalism, economics and health.

Keywords
controversy; Covid-19; sentiment analysis; data mining; Instagram