## I. INTRODUCTION Considering the outcomes of the Brazilian electoral process of 2018 and the disinformation during the sanitary crisis caused by Covid-19 pandemics as of 2020, the electoral campaign for president of Brazil in 2022 brought even more attention to the dispute for the meanings of truth, lie and fake news among the candidates seeking for votes. The ultimate example of such prominence was evidenced in the last national television debate that took place before the second round of the elections, when the Workers Party (PT) candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said that Jair Bolsonaro, who was running for Author $\sigma$: Doctor in Communications at PUCRS. Professor at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). Member of the Electoral Communication Research Group at UFPR. Author p: MBA in Data Journalism (IDP) and member of the Nucleo de Estudos em Jornalismo de Dados e Computacional - DataJor (CNPq/IDP). Author G: Master's student in Communications at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), member of the Nucleo de Estudos em Jornalismo de Dados e Computacional - DataJor (CNPq/IDP) and of the Laboratório de Pesquisa em Mídia, Discurso e Analise de Redes Sociais - MídiaRS. reelection with the Liberal Party (PL), "lied 6,498 times" since he had taken office. The source of this number is the fact-checking website Aos Fatos, that verifies Bolsonaro's statements since 2019 (Aos Fatos, 2022, online). Another curious fact of the campaign is the Lula's campaign registered an official channel at the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) called "Verdade na Rede" ("Truth on the Web"). The website and the social media associated to that profile did not mention Lula or PT — not even in their identification colors. The content was mostly verifications with a similar format as those used by journalistic initiatives specialized on checking digital content, refuting disinformation about Lula.[^15] After a TSE decision, on September, $20^{\text{th}}$, the channels were withheld (D'Angelo, 2022, online) and reestablished days later with changes that made it clear that they had electoral campaign content. Understanding the meanings generated by spokespeople who had influence on the electoral debate—in this case, the candidates themselves—through their channels on social media platforms, where they obtain huge engagement (Recuero, 2021), is necessary to problemize the tensions in the highly polarized contemporary media and political environment. In this scenario, each candidate can trigger their particular meanings for these terms to gain the sympathy of their electorate. These meanings, however, can reinforce as well as distort the comprehension about disinformation in the electoral debate. Given such circumstances, our research monitored mentions to the terms "fake news", "truth" and "lie" in candidates Lula and Bolsonaro's postings on their Twitter profiles during the electoral campaign for president of Brazil in 2022. Our general objective is to understand the generated meanings related to those words on the candidates speeches during the first round campaign period — from August, $16^{\text{th}}$, the first day of electoral advertising, to October, $2^{\text{nd}}$ (included), the voting day. We aimed to capture the discursive intentions in the various situations in which the terms were mentioned by the candidates and tension the discursive divergences and convergences around the terms in the statements of candidates in such different positions in the political-ideological spectrum, following the French Discourse Analysis methodology. To better understand the results, we started with contemporary studies about disinformation on digital platforms and their key concepts are discussed hereinafter. In the next section, we proceed to the discourse analysis of meanings, contextualizing the contents based on sample postings of each discursive sequence identified. As a result, we found a noticeably rhetorical stance in Jair Bolsonaro's postings, which aims to reinforce a particular view of "truth" and "lie". No mentions of the term "fake news" were found on Bolsonaro's profile during the considered period. On the other hand, Lula reinforces an intention to validate the veracity of his statements or to reaffirm the falseness of his opponent's assertions, using discourse techniques which are similar to those of professional fact-checkers. The 14 times the expression "fake news" appears in Lula's postings on Twitter during the period is a clear demonstration of that. ## II. KEY CONCEPTS The contemporary studies on information disorder (Wardle; Derahkshan, 2017) go in the same direction of the discussion about what is being called by several authors as "attention economy" (Da Empoli, 2020; Cesarino, 2022). The concept is not that new. In 1996, after identifying a paradigmatic shift in journalism, Charron and Bonville (2016, p. 340), for example, already referred to technical conditions of message production and reception that created a competitive situation not only between media, but also between the messages, which they defined as "hypercompetition". According to the Canadian theorists, this low intensity competition model evolves to a much more intense model starting in the 1970's. According to Charron and Bonville, in the last thirty years, the number of those competing for the consumers' attention and the advertisers' money significantly grew, while the available attention volume and the publicity expenses did not grow in the same pace. However, in the attention market, the media competes against all activities in life (professional, personal, entertainment, etc.) which demand time. Yet, the available time per capita for media consumption did not raise in the last decades; people's life style transformations tend to shorten it (Charron; Bonville, 2016, p. 353). In the second decade of the $21^{\text{st}}$ century, the limited attention market was dominated by technology companies on the "platform press" (Bell; Owen, 2017), where an ecosystem was formed by a small number of technology companies that today manage a significant amount of information in our society and therefore influences the public opinion. The content hosting, distribution and monetization roles were absorbed by these companies, which converted in news, personal information and advertisement aggregators in various media formats—text, photo, audio, video. Besides that, these platforms capture the audience data—and profit with that data, since they enable targeting campaigns to highly specific user profiles. This model demands scaling up in order to generate outcomes, which also stimulates the production of "viral" content, the use of bots, fake profiles and the creation of "digital guerrillas" to amplify the reach non-organically. This process intensifies the creation of parallel worlds, in which users are increasingly exposed to their own world perspectives, and this is intimately related to the disinformation phenomenon. There are conceptual discussions about the approach of this phenomenon, also called "post-truth" by some authors. According to Guareschi, Amon, Guerra (2017, p. 14), the term "post-truth" is only used as a euphemism for "lie", removing from it the relevance to be studied as a distinct phenomenon. For experts, the term "post-factual" would better convey the idea of loss of confidence in facts. The definition of fake news is also considered problematic. Allcott and Gentzkow (2017, p. 213) define it as "news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false, and could mislead readers". The authors exclude from this categorization several contents which they call "close cousins" of fake news, such as unintentional reporting errors, rumors originated from a particular news article, conspiracy theories, satires misinterpreted as facts, false statements from politicians, and biased articles that are not completely false. Many content categories framed as disinformation in Claire Wardle's (2020) definition are out of the scope proposed by Allcott and Gentzkow. Pursuant to Wardle, there are seven main types of disinformation: satire or parody, false connection, misleading content, false context, impostor content, manipulated content, and fabricated content. Therefore, the definition of information disorder proposed by Wardle and Derahkshan (2017) tries to amplify the understanding of information "pollution" and to avoid the emptying of the term "fake news" in politics, which is frequently used by political leaders to counteract speeches the do not favor them—specially from the professional press. Wardle and Derahkshan (2017) offer three conceptual classifications to discuss the problem of disinformation: misinformation, when fake data is shared, but with no intention to cause harm; misinformation, when false data is shared consciously in order to cause harm; malinformation, when genuine information is shared in order to cause harm, frequently related to personal or intimate data leakage. From a cybernetic perspective, founded on digital anthropology, Leticia Cesarino questions the notion of "post-truth" disseminated as of 2016, when Oxford Dictionary chose it as the word of the year, defining it as an adjective "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief" (Oxford, 2016, online). In agreement with Cesarino, the separation of emotion and reason, subjectiveness and objectiveness comes from obsolete assumptions. Moreover, it is impossible to dissociate the new media from the body of the human users or, more specifically, from their "embodied cognition" (Cesarino, 2022, p. 209). She addresses the algorithmic agencying in the contemporary processes of truth production as a cognitive process that is related to the construction of social confidence in an "emerging anti-structural dynamics": The new media introduce a cybernetic bias that favors the emerging and proliferation of anti-structural forces in science as well. [...] While undermining social confidence on the preexisting expert system, the new media enable transferring it to different mediators—after all, it is impossible for human cognition to live in caos. (Cesarino, 2022, p. 228) The author considers as expert systems, for instance, the education system and the professional press, which are social institutions that traditionally had the symbolic function of producing minimal social knowledge and consensus in democratic societies. In the platform society, where the real time, first-person shared testimony outruns the analytical slowness of the expert systems in giving meaning to events, a new path opens for conspiracy theories, where "contents not only undergo the revealing movement of showing facts in real time, but also are accompanied with the movement of emerging a truth that the 'elite' does not want the user to know"2 (Cesarino, 2022, p. 232). Therefore, says the researcher, disinformation is not isolated pieces of false information: "It is a whole custom environment produced and delivered to each user by the algorithms"3 (Cesarino, 2022, p. 245, original italics). And the "engineers of chaos" (Da Empoli, 2020) have been efficient in articulating such agencying for political purposes. While revisiting a series of far-right political movements, Da Empoli offers a diagnostic about how the Internet, initially seen as a place for a democratic revolution, became an instrument of control, the vector of a revolution from top to bottom, that captures a huge amount of data and use it for commercial and political purposes (Da Empoli, 2020, p. 54). The strategies of social mobilization—which produce consensus without any factual or scientific basis—reinforce political influencers without mentioning politics. As explained by Da Empoli, indignation, fear, prejudice, insult, race or gender controversy propagate on screens and generate much more attention and engagement than the tedious debate of old politics (Da Empoli, 2020, p. 88). It is a "revolution" that comes from the top of the social pyramid in an economic point of view, since they are the actors capable of capitalizing these spaces, creating charismatic leaders and highly influential gurus on social networks and then catapult them into institutional power, where they are able to pursuit higher political purposes. The author names the result as "quantum politics", where objective reality does not exist, since the version of the world each one of us sees is literally invisible to the eyes of others (Da Empoli, 2020, p. 175). Discussing the concept or the definition of "truth" is not the object of this article. We aim to observe how the meanings of truth—as well as of lie and fake news—are socially constructed based on the discursive mobilization of political leaders when they give a statement or post on their channels in digital platforms. It is understood that the dissemination of such meanings in these spaces arise from discourse strategies that consider the full potential of how digital platforms work, and the final intention is to mobilize users in order to achieve their political interests. Capturing these meanings is relevant to discuss larger political projects imparted in the candidates' analyzed discourse strategies and to problematize the influence of these strategies on representative democracy. ## III. MEANING ANALYSIS As claimed by Charaudeau (2008, p. 7), "language is power, perhaps man's first power". Through that power, men build language and shape it via exchanges and contacts throughout history. Consequently, language is a complex phenomenon that is not simply handling grammar rules and lexicon; it is much more of a staging of social life (Charaudeau, 2008). Due to this characteristic, language becomes an instrument of communication that is always functioning, both in everyday or colloquial relations and in institutional or formal interactions (Manhães, 2005). In other words, discourse is a language on the move. Because of this perception, Discourse Analysis (DA) came up to study language beyond a system of grammar or linguistic formal rules. According to Orlandi (2000, p 15): [...] Discourse Analysis, as the name indicates, is not about language or grammar, even though both things are in its scope. It is about discourse. Etymologically, the term carries the idea of course, run, movement. Therefore, discourse is words on the move, the practice of language; as we study discourse, we observe people talking.[^4] In Discourse Analysis, as the author emphasizes, we seek to understand language when it is making sense, in a symbolic point of view, but not as an abstract system. We try to understand it through ways of meaning, considering the fact that the production of meanings is part of human life, whether as an isolated subject or as member of a community. For this reason, Discourse Analysis also considers the conditions of language production and the contexts in which it is produced. Namely, it relates language to its exteriority, as Orlandi claims (2000). And, in this exteriority, there are both ideological and social aspects that will influence the formation of discourse and the discourse strategies that will be used. These strategies are language operations used to produce effects of meaning. According to Charaudeau (2006, p. 218), the term strategy comes from the art of leading the operations of an army on the action field. In discourse, words are that army. In the Discourse Analysis perspective, it is known and has become common sense to state that there is no autonomous discourse: every discourse is necessarily related to other discourses. That is, in accordance with Foucault (1997), discourse is a practice that relates language to "other practices" in the social field. Therefore, words can convey different meanings, depending on the ideological stance of the speaking subject. These meanings derive from a discursive formation, which is constituted in the material instance of ideological formations. Foucault (1997) was one of the first scholars to focus on the Discursive Formation (DF). For the author, it is established based on certain regularities, such as order, correlation, functioning and transformation. Under these conditions, discourse is constituted by a set of utterances that originate from the same DF system. In short, an utterance belongs to a DF as much as a sentence belongs to a text. In the early stages of Discourse Analysis, Pêcheux (1995, p. 312) considered a DF as a "closed corpus of discursive sequences" selected from a discursive space that is dominated by stable and homogeneous conditions of productions. Later, the author changed his idea of DF, relating it to notions of meaning and discourse subject, considering it as open and mutable. In this view of Discursive Formation, it is understood that words change their meaning depending on the positions of those who use them. According to the author, this happens because the Discursive Formation is what, in a given ideological formation, that is, from a given position in a given scenario, determines what can and must be said (Pêcheux, 1995, p. 160). Orlandi (2000) complements, from the Discourse Analysis point of view, that the mere repetition (paraphrase) already conveys a different meaning, because it introduces a change in the discursive process. As per the author, when someone says the same thing twice, there is different effect of meaning each time, because they are two different events, just as two different words can also reaffirm the same meaning. Because of that, as mentioned by Benetti (2007), to analyze a text, first it is necessary to identify the DFs in it, since each DF is a kind of region of meanings. So, continues the author, the analyst's job is to identify and gather excerpts of the text—called Discursive Sequences (DS)—around nuclear meanings. Each one of these nuclei of meaning composes a DF and there are as many discursive formations and nuclear meanings as we can find in a text (Benetti, 2007). The analyst must, concludes the author, locate the discursive marks of the tracked meaning, the repetitions of meaning, which will enable the identification of the DFs. That is exactly what was done in this research. We collected tweets from the official profiles of the two main presidential candidates of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro (PL) and Lula (PT), from August, $16^{\text{th}}$ to October, $2^{\text{nd}}$, 2022, comprising the period of the first round of the Brazilian elections. Using the advanced search tool available on the social network's website, we searched the words "truth" (22 occurrences total), "lie" (17 occurrences total) and "fake news" (14 occurrences total). After the collection of data, we identified the discursive formations related to the monitored terms and, within them, the discursive sequences that gave meaning to the discursive formation being analyzed. It is important to mention the number of discursive sequences is higher than the number of postings, because many referred to different nuclear meanings. ### a) Truth on Lula's profile On Lula's profile, we identified 19 discursive sequences for the discursive formation "Truth". Discursive Sequence Combat Against Lies: 8 Discursive sequence São Francisco River Transposition: 2 Discursive sequence Unemployment: 1 Discursive sequence Countdown to the Election: 1 Discursive sequence Geraldo Alckmin: 1 Discursive sequence Engagement on Social Networks: 1 In the postings identified with the word truth, there were 11 different discursive sequences. In all of them, the meaning was always intended to clarify the truth, seeking to answer messages that aimed to produce untruth and disinformation meanings. Two postings clearly illustrate the effects of meaning intended, based on two different DSs. "Spread the truth: 15 lies against Lula were already withdrawn from social media by TSE, including untruthful content disseminated by Bolsonaro. Lying is part of the strategy used by the Office of Hatred."5 (Lula Oficial, 2022) "Water is a basic right of all. That is why Lula and Dilma made over than $80\%$ of the São Francisco River Transposition. While Bolsonaro lies, the people of the Northeast knows who truly provided the construction." (Lula Oficial, 2022b) $^6$ The fist case is an example of DS Combat Against Lies. There was a notorious effort by Lula's campaign to position the Labor Party's candidate as someone who cares about truthful information, counterweighting Jair Bolsonaro's already consolidated image of disinformation disseminator. This started in the prior electoral campaign and went along his whole term of office, due to the daily verifications, for instance, performed by the fact-checking website Aos Fatos, mentioned in the introduction of this paper. Bolsonaro's profiles are frequently the object of researches that point out the usage of deceptive discourse as part of his communication strategy. There are approaches that apply techniques of discourse analysis, such as Viscardi's (2020) work, who analyzed Bolsonaro's Twitter in the 2018 elections; and also Gehrke's and Benetti's, who analyzed disinformation related to Covid-19 in Brazil and identified the former president and his sons as some of the main disseminators of false and deceptive discourse about the disease and its treatment. In the second posting, we have the DS São Francisco River Transposition, a construction work that was initiated during the Labor Party's government and carried on by Bolsonaro's administration. The undertaking generated a dispute on media and in the debates about who was really responsible for the construction. ### b) Lie on Lula's profile In the discursive formation "Lie", we found 18 DSs: Discursive Sequence Combat Against Lies: 11 Discursive sequence Evangelicals: 1 Discursive sequence Campaign Donation: 1 Discursive sequence Religious Freedom: 1 Discursive sequence Bolsonaro: 1 Discursive sequence Press: 1 Discursive sequence Lawsuit Against Lula 1 Like in the postings identified for truth, the objective was always more forceful in this DF: that is, seeking to clarify the effects of disinformation intended by the opponent in the electoral campaign. At least one posting demonstrates the presence of DS Combat Against Lies: "The current president is not used to coexist democratically. He has never met with unionists, indigenous people,quilombolas or entities that represent women. He only meets with his own gang to create lies. For him, it doesn't matter if he is lying or saying the truth". (Lula Oficial, 2022b)7 ### c) Fake News on Lula's profile For the DF "fake news", we found 23 DSs on Lula's postings on Twitter during the considered period: Discursive Sequence Combat Against Lies: 13 Discursive sequence Countdown to the Election: 3 Discursive sequence Engagement on Social Networks: 2 Discursive sequence Evangelicals: 1 Discursive sequence Violence Against Women: 1 Discursive sequence Campaign Donation: 1 Discursive sequence Bolsonaro's Motociata: 1 In the postings identified with the expression "fake news", the effect of meaning of the discursive sequences was to introduce and point out the disinformation in the public debate and to fight it. An example that shows an attempt of fighting fake news, precisely through the DS Combat Against Lies, is presented below: "We are in the homestretch and we will always stick with the truth. To follow the news of the combat against fake news, follow @Lulapelverdade on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. https://lula.com.br/verdade-na-rede/. (Lula Oficial, 2022c)8 Note that the posting refers to the profile "Verdade na Rede" as a source to follow the news of the combat against fake news. As addressed in the introduction of this article, this channel was questioned in the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) for not having, initially, any clear mention to Lula's party or campaign, despite the fact that it had been registered as an official profile in the candidacy registration available in the portal DivulgaCand, where TSE publishes the data that the candidates provided in their application. Specially dedicated to fight the rumors about Lula, the channel is a concrete example of the campaign's image building of Lula as an antagonist of Bolsonaro when it comes to disinformation. Based on the persuasive techniques and procedures described by Roiz (1994), it is possible to make a more specific analysis of Lula's postings regarding the expressions Lie, Truth and Fake News. Using basically a verification narrative in the postings, Lula's campaign sought to give a persuasive intention to the information they considered interesting for his campaign, such as trying to demonstrate that his opponent used to invoke lies or disinformation. For this purpose, in a linguistic point of view, there was also a concern to structure the situation, facts or events in a simplified way in order to facilitate the understanding of the meanings. In argumentative terms, the postings were always treated with an interest on facts of reality, systematically repeating itself and followed of value judgments, in order to produce an effect of meaning that the messages issued by candidate Bolsonaro could contain untruths in his statements. ### d) Truth on Bolsonaro's profile We identified 9 discursive sequences for "truth" in Jair Bolsonaro's postings on Twitter during the analyzed period: Discursive sequence Comparison Between Governments: 2 Discursive sequence Dictatorship: 1 Discursive sequence Press: 1 Discursive sequence Truth: 1 Discursive sequence Brazil Is Ours: 1 Discursive sequence Brazil Overcoming Challenges: 1 Discursive sequence UN: 1 According to the postings, there is a clear production of meaning seeking to show that today's Brazil, in Bolsonaro's administration, is better and overcoming challenges. "Today's Brazil no longer serves these outdated regimes. Today we serve our people! The public money, which in fact belongs to Brazilians, when not given back through tax reductions, is used to develop our country, not to support dictatorships anymore. (Jair Bolsonaro, 2022) $^9$ In this posting, we find two different DSs: the comparison between governments, mentioning "outdated regimes", and the DS about dictatorship. An aspect that should be highlighted in this relation is the attempt to support a speech that defends the nation's freedom, connecting the opponent to Latin American "socialist dictatorships", while Bolsonaro is frequently labeled as authoritarian by this political rivals and the press. The discourse seeks to invert the discussion of authoritarianism based on the polarizing—and populist—logic of "us against them": the others are authoritarian, because they support dictators. This the "truth" in Bolsonaro's speech. This type of discourse is qualified as an example of Bolsonaro's "raging populism" in Viscardi's (2020) analysis of the 2018 elections, in which the discourses of hate against the Labs Party (of candidate Fernando Haddad) and of fight against corruption reflect the dissatisfaction of a portion of the population with Brazilian politicians and bring these people together" (Viscardi, 2020, p. 1153). In a different analysis of meanings, in the context of the Covid-19 pandemics, Seibt and Dannenberg (2021) associate Bolsonaro's discourse strategies on Twitter to authoritarian speech characteristics, based on Levitsky and Ziblat (2018), one of those characteristics being the identification of enemies—the "system", the media, the corrupt. The example above contains all these aspects—the anti-Labor Party stance, the corruption. ### e) Lie on Bolsonaro's profile For the DF "Lie", we found 5 DSs in Bolsonaro's postings: Discursive sequence Taxes: 1 Discursive sequence Comparison Between Governments: 1 Discursive sequence The Father of Lies: 1 Discursive sequence Corruption: 1 The discursive sequences found in the postings seek to produce an effect of meaning that the previous governments used to lie. An example of posting and DS that illustrates this item is: "Before our arrival, Brazil was characterized by the high taxes. No one talked about reduction, because the administrations always billed the people for their harmful politics and practices. They said that less taxes meant less tax collection, which we proved to be a big lie". (Jair Bolsonaro, 2022a) $^{10}$ It is evident that the intention is to create a meaning of lie for the previous administrations, triggering the already mentioned discourse strategies of polarization and hate—the raging populism—, keeping the connection with the audience—the "people"—base on a purely rhetorical effort, with no commitment to factual truth. ### f) Fake news on Bolsonaro's profile We did not find any posting and, consequently, any discursive analysis related to the term on Bolsonaro's profile during the analyzed period. On one hand, this is surprising, since fake news became a highly relativized term in the public debate, used by the republican Donald Trump, in the United States, to even contradict the press. On the other, it is symptomatic that Bolsonaro does not use this term, since he is frequently accused by his political opponents—and by the press—of producing and disseminating fake news. Just as it was done with candidate Lula, it is also possible a more specific analysis of Bolsonaro's campaign related to the persuasive techniques and procedures classified by Roiz (1994). Unlike Lula, who tried to establish a narrative closer to verification, Bolsonaro's campaign on Twitter sought to exploit superficial feelings and emotions of his voters, such as patriotic ideals, fantasies and obsessions. For that purpose, his campaign tried to promote the association of simplifying procedures, seeking to create two totally opposite fields. That is, his field of alleged truths; and his opponent's, with alleged lies. For that, exaggerations or distortions were used to describe some details of facts or events. Moreover, seeking to convince through the repetition of topics, such as the arguments that Brazil was much better compared to previous administrations. ## IV. FINAL CONSIDERATIONS The connection between the meanings produced by the two main candidates for president of Brazil in 2022, who featured the closest second round in the Brazilian democracy history[^11], is that both sought to produce their own meanings of truth and lie when speaking to their followers. That is, there was a concern in reaffirming or repositioning the meanings of truth on the official profiles. However, the Lula's and Bolsonaro's discourse strategies are completely different. Lula, who was elected for his third mandate as the president of Brazil, sought to create a verification narrative, with several postings classified in the discursive sequence (DS) of Combat Against Lies in all of the three analyzed discursive formations (DF). Bolsonaro prioritized a rhetorical speech, endorsing oppositions such as "us against them" and "good versus evil". This discourse characterizes not only his profile, but also the whole Bolsonaro clan, considering that Carlos, Eduardo and Flavio Bolsonaro, sons of the then president, who respectively hold office at the City Council of Rio de Janeiro, Federal House of Representatives and Senate, are highly active in social media.[^12] After the elections, a question that remains is: will this discursive clash on social media continue after Lula's inauguration? And also: in the next elections, whether for president or not, will technology tools also be used as an instrument to convince the voters? Based on what was seen in the 2022 election, the discursive battle was not around the comparison of propositions. Strategies of counterpropaganda and disqualification of opponents have always been applied in electoral campaigns. However, nothing useful for the Brazilian democracy came out of what happened in 2022. It is important that researches stitched together by understandings of media education, political science and online behavior come closer. From transdisciplinary perceptions like this, it will be possible to elaborate tools and methods that aim to develop—and possibly mitigate—the social consequences of disinformation. [^4]: My own translation for the following original text: “[...] a Análise de Discurso, como seu propre name indica, não-Life da lingua, não-Life da gramática, embarra todas estas coisas Ihe interessem. Ela-Life do discurso. E aPALAVRA discurso, etimologicamente, tem em si a ideia de curso, de percuro, de correr por, de movimento. O discurso é assim palavra em movimento, praquia de linguagem; com o estudo do discurso observa-se o homem falando.” _(p.4)_ [^11]: A different study analyzed postings by the Bolsonaro clan with the aid of the BolsData platform, which considered the meanings of postings by Carlos, Eduardo, Flavio and Jair Bolsonaro on their official profiles on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, as well as messages they shared in public channels in Telegram app, where a certain discursive pattern between the family members was observed (Afonte, 2022). _(p.7)_ [^12]: The Brazilian president election had a second round on October, $30^{\text{th}}$, 2022, when Lula (PT) was elected with $50.9\%$ of votes and Bolsonaro received $49.1\%$ of votes. _(p.7)_ [^7]: My own translation for the following original text: "O atual presidente não está Habituíado a conviver democracamente. Ele nunca se reuniu com sindicalistas, indígenas,quilombolas ou entidas representativas de mulheres. Ele sé se reuné com a turma dele para fazer mentiras. Para ele, mentir ou falar a Verdade não tem dificença." My own translation for the following original text: "Estamos na reta final e seguiremos com a Verdade sempre. Para acompanhar as noticias de combate às fake news, siga as redes @Lulapelverdade no Twitter, no Facebook, no Instagram e no Tiktok. https://lula.com.br/ Verdade-na-rede/" _(p.5)_ [^9]: My own translation for the following original text: "O Brasil do presente deixou de servir a esses régimes ultrapassados. Hoje servimos ao meu povo! O dinheiro(publico, que na Verdade é dos brasileiros, quando não devolvido atraves de reduções de impostos, é uso para desenvolver o meu País e não mais sustentar ditaduras". _(p.6)_ [^10]: My own translation for the following original text: "Antes de)nossa chegada, o Brasil eramarcado pelos altos impostos. Não se ouvia falar em redução, porque governos sempre repassaram a conta de suasPLLticas e prácticas nefastas para o povo. Diziam que menos impostos era menos arrecadação, o que provamos seruma grande mentira". _(p.6)_ [^15]: mentiras contra Lula ja foram derrubadas das redes sociais pelo TSE, inclusive conteudos mentirosos divulgados por Bolsonaro. Para o gabinete do odio, motivo faz parte da estrategia". _(p.5)_

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