Emerging Digital Spaces: The Case of Bluesky’s Rise During 2024 Brazilian Elections
Resumo
This paper examines political discourse on Bluesky during Brazil’s 2024 municipal elections, following the unexpected Twitter ban in the country. Using keyword-based data collection and embedding-based sentiment analysis (WEAT), we analyze user perceptions and their evolution across electoral phases. Our findings reveal significant shifts in candidate popularity, closely tied to electoral outcomes and broader ideological trends, with clear patterns of polarization. Notably, candidate sentiment fluctuated between election rounds, reflecting both victories and defeats. This study highlights Bluesky’s emerging role in digital political engagement when mainstream platforms are disrupted.Referências
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Caliskan, A., Bryson, J. J., and Narayanan, A. (2017). Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases. Science, 356(6334):183–186.
Couto, J. M. M., Reis, J. C. S., and Benevenuto, F. (2024). Can computer network attributes be useful for identifying low-credibility websites? a case study in brazil. Social Network Analysis and Mining, 14(1):153.
Flamino, J., Galeazzi, A., Feldman, S., Macy, M. W., Cross, B., Zhou, Z., Serafino, M., Bovet, A., Makse, H. A., and Szymanski, B. K. (2023). Political polarization of news media and influencers on twitter in the 2016 and 2020 us presidential elections. Nature Human Behaviour, 7(6):904–916.
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Magno, G. and Almeida, V. (2021). Measuring international online human values with word embeddings. ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB), 16(2):1–38.
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Ottoni, R., Cunha, E., Magno, G., Bernardina, P., Meira Jr, W., and Almeida, V. (2018). Analyzing right-wing youtube channels: Hate, violence and discrimination. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on web science, pages 323–332.
Santillán-Vásquez, M. and Monard, E. (2024). Discursive practices during an electoral cycle: Public opinion and political disillusionment on twitter. Communication & Society, 37(4):73–90.
Santos, G. F. (2020). Social media, disinformation, and regulation of the electoral process: a study based on 2018 brazilian election experience. Revista de Investigações Constitucionais.
Shevtsov, A., Tzagkarakis, C., Antonakaki, D., and Ioannidis, S. (2022). Identification of twitter bots based on an explainable machine learning framework: The us 2020 elections case study. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 16(1):956–967.
Soares, F. B., Recuero, R., and Zago, G. (2019). Asymmetric polarization on twitter and the 2018 brazilian presidential elections. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Social Media and Society, SMSociety ’19, page 67–76, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery.
Speer, R., Chin, J., and Havasi, C. (2017). ConceptNet 5.5: An open multilingual graph of general knowledge. pages 4444–4451.
Tucker, J. A., Guess, A., Barbera, P., Vaccari, C., Siegel, A., Sanovich, S., Stukal, D., and Nyhan, B. (2018). Social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: A review of the scientific literature. SSRN. Available at SSRN: [link] DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3144139.
Tufekci, Z. (2014). Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. Yale University Press. ISBN: 978-0300212270.
Vaccari, C., Valeriani, A., Barberà, P., Bonneau, R., Jost, J. T., Nagler, J., and Tucker, J. A. (2013). Social media and political communication: A survey of twitter users during the 2013 italian general election. Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica, 43(3):381.
Art, D. (2024). The radical right goes global (and local). Perspectives on Politics, 22(4):1285–1290.
Barbosa, G. A. R., Holanda, P. H. F., dos Santos, G. E., da Costa, C. C., Silva, I. S., Veloso, A., and Jr., W. M. (2013). Caracterização do uso de hashtags do twitter para mensurar o sentimento da população online: Um estudo de caso nas eleições presidenciais dos eua em 2012. In Anais do Simpósio Brasileiro de Banco de Dados (SBBD), Recife, PE, Brasil. Sociedade Brasileira de Computação.
Bento, P., Aquino, Y., Buzelin, A., Robles Dutenhefner, P., Chagas, A., Estanislau, V., Dayrell, L., Malaquias, S., Santana, C., Locatelli, M. S., Pappa, G. L., Meira Jr., W., and Almeida, V. (2025). Mapping hate and extremism: How brazilian reddit communities spread toxic discourse. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Cyber Social Threats (CySoc 2025), 19th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
Boulianne, S. (2015). Social media use and participation: A meta-analysis of current research. Information, Communication & Society, 18(5):524–538.
Buzelin, A., Robles Dutenhefner, P., Sartori Locatelli, M., Malaquias, S., Bento, P., Aquino, Y., Dayrell, L., Estanislau, V., Santana, C., Alzamora, P., Vasconcelos, M., Meira, W. J., and Almeida, V. (2025). Analyzing political discourse on discord during the 2024 u.s. presidential election. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Web Science Conference 2025, Websci ’25, page 272–282, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery.
Caliskan, A., Bryson, J. J., and Narayanan, A. (2017). Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases. Science, 356(6334):183–186.
Couto, J. M. M., Reis, J. C. S., and Benevenuto, F. (2024). Can computer network attributes be useful for identifying low-credibility websites? a case study in brazil. Social Network Analysis and Mining, 14(1):153.
Flamino, J., Galeazzi, A., Feldman, S., Macy, M. W., Cross, B., Zhou, Z., Serafino, M., Bovet, A., Makse, H. A., and Szymanski, B. K. (2023). Political polarization of news media and influencers on twitter in the 2016 and 2020 us presidential elections. Nature Human Behaviour, 7(6):904–916.
Fujiwara, T., Müller, K., and Schwarz, C. (2023). The effect of social media on elections: Evidence from the united states. Journal of the European Economic Association, 22(3):1495–1539.
Huszár, F., Ktena, S. I., O’Brien, C., Belli, L., Schlaikjer, A., and Hardt, M. (2021). Algorithmic amplification of politics on twitter. arXiv preprint, arXiv:2110.11010.
Jungherr, A. (2016). The logic of political coverage on twitter: Temporal dynamics and content. Information, Communication Society, 19(9):1197–1214.
Magno, G. and Almeida, V. (2021). Measuring international online human values with word embeddings. ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB), 16(2):1–38.
Mikolov, T., Chen, K., Corrado, G., and Dean, J. (2013a). Efficient estimation of word representations in vector space.
Mikolov, T., Sutskever, I., Chen, K., Corrado, G. S., and Dean, J. (2013b). Distributed representations of words and phrases and their compositionality. In Burges, C., Bottou, L., Welling, M., Ghahramani, Z., and Weinberger, K., editors, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, volume 26. Curran Associates, Inc.
Ottoni, R., Cunha, E., Magno, G., Bernardina, P., Meira Jr, W., and Almeida, V. (2018). Analyzing right-wing youtube channels: Hate, violence and discrimination. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on web science, pages 323–332.
Santillán-Vásquez, M. and Monard, E. (2024). Discursive practices during an electoral cycle: Public opinion and political disillusionment on twitter. Communication & Society, 37(4):73–90.
Santos, G. F. (2020). Social media, disinformation, and regulation of the electoral process: a study based on 2018 brazilian election experience. Revista de Investigações Constitucionais.
Shevtsov, A., Tzagkarakis, C., Antonakaki, D., and Ioannidis, S. (2022). Identification of twitter bots based on an explainable machine learning framework: The us 2020 elections case study. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 16(1):956–967.
Soares, F. B., Recuero, R., and Zago, G. (2019). Asymmetric polarization on twitter and the 2018 brazilian presidential elections. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Social Media and Society, SMSociety ’19, page 67–76, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery.
Speer, R., Chin, J., and Havasi, C. (2017). ConceptNet 5.5: An open multilingual graph of general knowledge. pages 4444–4451.
Tucker, J. A., Guess, A., Barbera, P., Vaccari, C., Siegel, A., Sanovich, S., Stukal, D., and Nyhan, B. (2018). Social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: A review of the scientific literature. SSRN. Available at SSRN: [link] DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3144139.
Tufekci, Z. (2014). Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. Yale University Press. ISBN: 978-0300212270.
Vaccari, C., Valeriani, A., Barberà, P., Bonneau, R., Jost, J. T., Nagler, J., and Tucker, J. A. (2013). Social media and political communication: A survey of twitter users during the 2013 italian general election. Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica, 43(3):381.
Publicado
20/07/2025
Como Citar
BUZELIN, Arthur et al.
Emerging Digital Spaces: The Case of Bluesky’s Rise During 2024 Brazilian Elections. In: BRAZILIAN WORKSHOP ON SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS AND MINING (BRASNAM), 14. , 2025, Maceió/AL.
Anais [...].
Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação,
2025
.
p. 269-282.
ISSN 2595-6094.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/brasnam.2025.9402.
