The Impact of the Covid-19 Cases with Twitter Users in Their Perception of the Brazilian Government

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, political discussions in Brazil revolved around the pandemic and the controversial leader Jair Bolsonaro. Twitter reflected these discussions, also bringing reports of user dramas that had family members victimized by Covid-19. This study investigates their perception of the federal government through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of these users' tweets. We have identified 3,756 Twitter users who reported cases of family members with Covid-19 and collected their government-related tweets before and after those reports. We analyzed the feelings expressed in these tweets using automated techniques and extracted a sample of 650 tweets that had difficult-to-understand terms for a manual analysis of the feelings. The study found subtle changes in the perceptions of people who approve or disapprove of the federal government.