A desordem informacional em tempos de vacinação contra a Covid-19: contribuições do Ministério da Saúde ao fenômeno a partir do seu discurso no Twitter

Abstract

This master's research has as its theme the informational disorder in times of vaccination against Covid-19, delimiting itself to the examination of the Ministry of Health (MS) discourse on Twitter, concerning the immunization against the disease, in the period from May 2021 to December 2022. In this line, it proposes to answer, using the methodology of discourse analysis (DA) procedure (ORLANDI, 1992, 2000), to what extent the discourse manifested by the Ministry of Health, in its Twitter account, during the vaccination against Covid-19, contributed to the informational disorder during the pandemic in Brazil. Supported by the deductive approach method, it starts from a theoretical substrate on communication and health (C&S) and its relationship with the current processes of informational disorder and infodemic and with the circulation of discourses on platforms, in order to arrive at the analysis of the particular scenario, consistent with the discourse manifested by the MS through Twitter. Thus, this work aims to analyze the contributions of the MS, from its tweets, to the informational disorder in the Brazilian pandemic context. As for the specific objectives, we sought to: 1) Contextualize the role of the Ministry of Health and its institutional uses of Twitter; 2) Map the mentions of Covid-19 vaccination made by the agency on the platform; 3) Analyze the discourse observed in this mapping; 4) Promote theoretical discussions about the relationship between the sociopolitical context experienced in the Covid-19 pandemic, the informational disorder and platforms — specifically Twitter. The temporal cut for the analysis of the research object comprised the interval between May 17, 2021, and December 31, 2022, the last day of the former minister Marcelo Queiroga and his team in the Health portfolio. The research corpus, then, was formed by the 568 tweets related to immunization broadcasted during this period and investigated using the computer-aided qualitative research technique, applied through the NVivo software. Analyzing the discourse found in this mapping, three discursive formations were identified, they are: “Informative with preponderance of self-promotion content”, “Informative with preponderance of incentive content” and “Informative without preponderance of self-promotion or incentive content”. From this, it was found that the MS emphasized its self-promotion, encouraged vaccination in an incipient way, and did not present itself as a sufficiently reliable source of information about immunizers against Covid-19. Thus, the results found allowed us to conclude that the public agency, both by what it gave visibility and what it silenced, contributed substantially to the informational disorder in the course of the pandemic in Brazil.