The Impact of Social Media on Brazilian Elections

Abstract

This research aims to address the current discussion regarding the impact of social media on voting behavior and election outcomes. Social networks are considered key platforms for the affirmation of political discourse. Nowadays, these platforms bring more information and facilitate the debate between the electorate, but at the same time, these networks can bring new potentialities for the false information to be spread causing attacks on the public opinion formation. Social media’s role in elections can influence millions of people, and thus, it is important to fully understand its consequences on the decision-making process of the voters during an election. The main hypothesis stands on the idea that these same new platforms where political discourse has been most debated, can motivate the electoral base to go in search of new direct information. However, when selecting, understanding, and adhering to this discourse these same base platforms can be influenced by the phenomenon of low quality false misinformation disseminated by influential electors, bringing the false truth and attacks on the base of public opinion, undermining the political performance of political actors for voter mobilization in favor of the attacker. Despite the number of available empirical analyzes have grown in recent decades, there is a scarcity of theoretical and methodological discussions in the field concerning the causal relationships between advertising campaigns and election results. Therefore, the second hypothesis motivating this research is that a proper data and methods combination which can model the votes distribution of an electoral process and test the counterfactual effects of possible interventions can also capture the public opinion’s polarization effect during the Brazilian electoral contest.