Negative campaign in the Brazilian presidential race: an analysis of the attacks posted on Facebook by the main candidates

In 2014, the polls indicated a fierce dispute between the two main candidates running for the Brazilian Presidency, Dilma Rousseff (Workers’ Party, PT) and Aécio Neves (Brazilian Social-Democracy’s Party, PSDB). During the campaign, their media attitude towards each other became quite aggressive at times, especially on social network sites. The use of digital media to attack opponents is a recent electoral communication strategy in Brazil, since this was only the second presidential race in which those tools could be officially employed by the candidates. In order to analyse this new context, this paper compares the negative campaigning promoted on Facebook by Dilma and Aécio in the pre-campaign and campaign periods. For the purpose of the investigation, we collected all the 3907 posts published on the two candidates’ official fan pages between 6 April and 26 October, 2014. Through the techniques of Content Analysis and Discourse Analysis, we identified and categorised the attacks based on the frequency, author, target and type of resource used. The results indicate that the electoral period was more negative than the pre-campaign, and that the preferred targets and the type of resource used by Rousseff and Neves varied over time.