Election campaigns and online political debate in 2014: the comments on the Facebook page of O Estado de S. Paulo

Abstract

This article discusses the use of social network sites as a new arena of debate, establishing itself as an extension of the public sphere. The objective of this article is to evaluate how newspaper readers of O Estado de S. Paulo used its profile on Facebook to express their opinions and discuss with other users about the 2014 presidential elections. 112,114 comments for 429 posts during the election period, in 2014, were encoded. The methodology is a quantitative content analysis, taking as its starting point a previously prepared codebook. This paper observes exclusively the attitude of commentators and reflexivity on comments, and used statistical tests to investigate the cases and compare data relating both to first and second rounds of elections. Three points are analyzed here: a) posture of the commentators; b) type of reflexivity adopted during the discussion; and c) type of reflexivity attached to each candidate mentioned in the comments.

Keywords:
public debate; 2014 elections; Facebook; O Estado de S. Paulo.