A construção discursiva das fake news sobre as vacinas no Brasil: uma análise do movimento antivacina nas redes sociais Facebook e Youtube

Abstract

Considering the impact of post-truth on society, especially in the digital environment, we seek, in this paper, to problematize how this phenomenon compromises public health campaigns, including vaccination campaigns in Brazil. In this context, we assumed as our main objective to understand how the discourse of the antivaccine movement is built and spread in social networks. As for the specific objectives, these aimed to identify the enunciative strategies of the antivaccine movement that circulate in social networks and compare these strategies with those present in the official discourse of the Ministry of Health, disseminated through news on the official website and on Facebook and Youtube. To do so, the methodological procedure included the analysis of fragments of some posts extracted from pages of the antivaccine movement on Facebook and Youtube that brought elements of post-truth, in order to examine whether there were and, what were the strategies used by the Ministry of Health to counter the discourse erected by such an antivaccine movement. This analysis was anchored on the concepts of truth and power, by Michel Foucault, media discourse, by Patrick Charaudeau and post-truth, from Pollyana Ferrari, Lúcia Santaella, among other authors who research the enunciative construction of post-truth. Among the results obtained in the analysis, we observed that the discourse of the antivaccine movement can be seen as a response to the institutional power of the Ministry of Health, which promotes hatred and misinformation within bubbles of fake news spread by social networks. Such discourse has become a point of contention that has been confronted by checking agencies and traditional media, in order to raise awareness about the dubious nature of antivaccine posts. Thus, this research sought to contribute to a more careful look and provoke reflection about the impacts of post-truth, especially in the health field, where alienation can result in irreversible damage.