Published in the scientific journal (OBS. ) Observatório, in a special issue associated with the EUMEPLAT Project (European Media Platforms: Assessing Positive and Negative Externalities for European Culture), the article “”The sovereignty of the region and its wealth is what really is at stake”1 Amazon fires in Jair Bolsonaro’s discourse on Twitter”, by Laara Carneiro, Livino Neto, Juliana Lima and Gleice Luz, analyzes how the event of the fires in the Brazilian Amazon in 2019, reported by the media as “Day of Fire”, by becoming a media event in a context of deep mediatization, is discussed by Jair Bolsonaro on his official Twitter account (currently X).

The article proposes that the discussion of this media event is part of a dispute over symbolic and persuasive power, which transcends the media and conflicts with other sources of information, lived experiences and the interests of specific social groups, influencing the construction of a mobilizing narrative that guides Bolsonaro’s discursive practice in the dispute for public opinion.

In this research, the authors carry out a thematic content analysis of the publications gathered from the @jairbolsonaro account between July 4 and September 16, 2019. They then construct two different discourse archetypes – one using elements of risk communication and the other using elements of populist communication – with the aim of understanding and identifying the characteristics and patterns of proximity between the tweets. Based on these two communication models and the political and social context surrounding this media event, Critical Discourse Analysis was used to interpret how Bolsonaro’s discourse relates to the Brazilian socio-environmental crisis highlighted here.

The article concludes that the discourse mediated through Bolsonaro’s Twitter account focuses on four main aspects: 1) it reacts to the transformation of the socio-environmental event “Day of Fire” into a media event; 2) it employs a populist construction of two antagonistic political camps as a strategy to reopen the public debate; 3) it seeks to silence non-capitalist ways of relating to the environment; and 4) it reveals a neoliberal populist discourse that neglects communication aimed at preventing and mitigating existing risks.

Read the full article at https://obs.obercom.pt/index.php/obs/article/view/2421