RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Last Friday was the toughest for Rodrigo Maia, president of the Chamber of Deputies, with 1.6 million posts published on Twitter against him, around 13 hashtags, among them the leading #ForaMaia (#OutMaia).
In an orchestration that astonished Bites consultancy, specialized in social media metrics analysis, 34 percent of everything commented about Maia’s name over the past 12 months was tweeted in only 24 hours.
“The action followed the pattern of Bolsonarist exchanges on social media, but it would be untrue to attribute it only to the use of robots, particularly Twitter, which has already denied the existence of this large-scale manipulation capability of its algorithm in Brazil,” said the Bites report.
There was much effort involved by the Bolsonarist militancy, spreading the attack over Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google Brazil and in WhatsApp and Telegram groups.
On Instagram, #ForaMaia achieved 77,000 posts on several profiles.
On Twitter, 238,000 profiles published seven posts each on average against Maia. Out of this total, 14 percent were original posts and 49 percent were retweeted, to increase the reach of the original attack messages.
“The attack also found an echo among Bolsonarist deputies, who in the last 24 hours published criticism of Maia on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. In total there were 29 posts that reached 323,000 interactions and the leader in this ranking was Eduardo Bolsonaro, who got 53,000 interactions in a message on Facebook,” Bites said.
State deputies of the PSL (Social Liberal Party) in Bahia, Ceará, Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso do Sul, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo also attacked the president of the Chamber of Deputies.
Source: Epoca