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Social Media and Presidential Campaigns – Preliminary Results of the 2018 Brazilian Presidential Election

The use of social media within modern political activities is a new phenomenon that reshapes election races and the way in which politicians communicate with voters. During the last presidential campaign in Brazil, the elected candidate had almost no time on TV (8 seconds) and very little party support but focused his campaign on social networks. In this context, the objective of this paper is to study the relationship between social media and the electoral performance of candidates running in the 2018 Brazilian presidential election by analyzing how candidates used their social media profiles, assessing how citizens interacted with them and identifying the correlations between a candidate’s performance on social media and votes received. For this, we collected and analyzed the numbers of followers and all posts from all 13 presidential candidates in the three major social networks, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, from January–October 2018. As a result, more than 41,000 posts and 291 million interactions were analyzed, and our findings show that: (i) candidates heavily used social media throughout the year, but focused on engaging words and avoided sensitive topics; (ii) Instagram garnered a higher increase in followers and a higher rate of interactions via posts in comparison to Facebook and Twitter; (iii) there was found no correlation between the number of posts and votes received, with a very small negative correlation with posting about sensitive topics, and a strong correlation between votes and followers, and votes and engagement, mainly on Instagram; and (iv) more studies are needed to build a general prediction model using combined data from all of these networks.