Fake news e univocidade: análise de discurso religioso veiculado no ano eleitoral de 2022

Abstract

The 2022 elections were marked by the prominence of religious discourse intertwined with concepts propagated during the Cold War. Combined with the post-COVID-19 pandemic social context, the election was the most fiercely contested since Brazil’s re-democratization in 1988. In this scenario, the proposed research focuses on analyzing two videos from cyberculture, both circulated during the 2022 election year: É impossível ser cristão e ser de esquerda (YOUTUBE, 2022), a live stream by the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (IURD) on its official channel, and “Lula com demônio no corpo” (Lula possessed by a demon), a fake news piece involving President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, primarily distributed via WhatsApp. The aim is to investigate the similarities and differences in the manipulation of discourse and the dissemination of disinformative content using Discourse Analysis based on the French school of Michel Pêcheux. Furthermore, the research examines IURD’s discourse, historically tied to Brazilian politics, at other moments, exploring the intersection of religion and partisan political power. The results expand the understanding of disinformation in different formats, whether in false content, as in Lula com demônio no corpo, or in the univocality of discourse, in this case by the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in the aforementioned live stream. As a general objective, the study seeks to present religiously motivated falsehoods – treated as fake news – whose anonymity is facilitated by new technologies, as well as omissions and univocal discourses related to the church in question. This aims to relate their social, cultural, and linguistic markers in contemporary productions disseminated in the context of the 2022 presidential elections.