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Twitter in Brazil: Discourses on China in times of coronavirus

Abstract The health crisis caused by the new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) exposes latent social tensions arising from the process of globalization. The battle for the history of the responsibility for the crisis opens new fronts in which, thanks to social media, the public seems to be actively engaged. The first case of coronavirus in Brazil was confirmed in February, followed by a rapid increase in cases, news, and discourses on social media. Against this background, this article examines the following research question: what themes and sentiments are evoked in tweets posted in Portuguese linking the COVID-19 pandemic to China? We conducted a time series study of tweets posted during the period 19 March to April 3, 2020, retrieving 1.6 million tweets. The data was filtered in three stages and thematic and sentiment analysis was performed across the data set. The findings show that the most frequently occurring themes were the “Chinese virus”, “virus from China”, use of chloroquine, cure, the press and quality of information, dictatorship, China, Bolsonaro, and communism. The content of the tweets on these themes clearly reveals user sentiment, with a predominance of negative sentiments (fear, sadness and anger) and low proportion of sentiments in the category trust. The themes and sentiments evoked in the tweets reveal elements that characterize the current context of political polarization in Brazil and its effects on Twitter users’ understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic.