The indicator, calculated daily by the research and consulting company quaest and published by the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper, records that the ex-far-right president has 21 points -out of a maximum of 100-, 19 points less than the figure registered on Saturdayone day before the assault.
According to IPD, the balance of the attacks on the three state powers in the federal capital was negative for the former president in a field that is favorable to him, the virtual, and may indicate a fracture in the Bolsonaro base and also the uncertainty about the mobilizing potential of the Leader.
The peak of popularity of the then president, who was hospitalized in the United States yesterday due to abdominal pain, was recorded on October 7, between the first and second presidential rounds, when he reached 88.1 points, the best mark since the index became daily, in January 2019.
The São Paulo newspaper had already been predicting a decline in Bolsonaro’s results since his defeat against President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who in the first days of his term obtained around 70 points in the popularity monitoring system.
According to Felipe Nunes, director of quaest and professor of quantitative methods at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), this loss of influence in social networks constitutes a significant defeat for Bolsonaroa political leader who emerged and was consolidated in the public space, precisely in the virtual environment.
How popularity is calculated on social networks
The IPD is calculated by an artificial intelligence algorithm that collects and processes 152 variables from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Wikipedia and Google platforms.
In the final score are weighted five variables: fame (number of followers), engagement (comments and “likes” per publication), mobilization (retweets and shared comments), Valencia (proportion of positive and negative reactions) and interest (search volume).
The weight of each of these dimensions in the account is determined by a model assimilated by the machine based on the real results of previous elections, with thousands of monitored candidacies.
According to Nunes, who is also a political scientist, Bolsonaro’s reaction after the defeat, marked by a long silence broken only by unclear statements to his supporters and his abrupt trip to the United States before the end of his term, significantly divided the capital he held in the digital space.
On the other hand, according to Nunes, “the record shows that if the objective of the demonstrations carried out after the defeat was to undermine the popularity and governability of President Lula, what actually happened was that they affected the credibility of Bolsonarismo, making it difficult for opposition work, which is now associated with those events,” he said.
Even so, the detailed analysis of the data that make up the IPD, allows us to conclude that the far-right maintains considerable strength in criteria such as fame and mobilization, but is especially weak in terms of valence, which is the balance between positive reactions and negative to their interventions.
“It means that his image is more negative because there are more negative comments about him. And also because he can’t, or doesn’t want to, produce a more coordinated articulation. In short, he loses an asset that was very important to him.”he claimed.
On the day of the coup attacks on the headquarters of the three powers of Brazil, Bolsonaro posted ambiguous comments on Twitter. He, in a way, condemned the events, but his position should have been more unequivocal, Nunes insists.
“The Bolsonaro base today is cracked, and dividing the base results in a loss. Every time that, during the electoral campaign, Bolsonaro radicalized his speech, popularity fell. Now, with his name associated with the events in Brasilia, he ends up being harmed in the digital harvest”, concluded the expert.
Source: Ambito
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