Fake news and political polarization in Brazil: antibolsonarism on Twitter from the Covid-19 pandemic until the 2022 presidential elections

“Fake news” include a diverse mesh of false information, defamation and slander – disseminated in an organized and strategic way, or through organic networks (Zhuravskaya et al, 2020). This is a qualitative investigation, combining participant observation with data collected through a prolonged online ethnography, carried out between the Spring of 2020 (beginning of the pandemic crisis), through the CPI of Covid in the Brazilian Senate (April-October 2021), and until to Autumn of 2022 (Brazilian presidential elections). It was carried out through the social network Twitter, and data were analyzed by using NVivo 11. The results allow the analysis of the typical modus operandi of both Bolsonarism and anti-Bolsonarism, including the graphs shared by data analysts (Barciela and Malini, 2020-2022). They will be particularly relevant to European sociologists who are interested in the American influence on Brazilian politics and on the ways how new media influence and interact with political events.