A ciberviolência discursiva presente na ampliação tecnodiscursiva: comentários-troll dirigidos ao divulgador científico Atila lamarino em tuítes sobre a Covid-19

Abstract

In a historical context of public health crisis in Brazil, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic was marked by the defense of scientific and anti-scientific agendas. On the one hand, we experience the unbridled dissemination of fake news and theories of denial of scientific knowledge; on the other hand, we follow the hard work of scientists in the search for vaccines and treatment for Covid-19 and of scientific popularizers in the activity of public communication of science to the non-specialized public. Social media played an essential role in this context to inform the results of research on Sars-CoV-2, but also facilitated the promotion of disinformation and denialist discourses. The biologist and microbiologist Atila Iamarino is among the main scientific popularizers who gained notoriety for their work in the dissemination of science and conquered other media spaces during this period. However, the bursting of the disclosure bubble, marked by his participation in the Roda Viva Program in March 2020, led to numerous attacks of verbal violence against him as a spokesperson for science. They were carried out by individuals who deny science, a phenomenon that occurred mainly in response to tweets promoting science published by @oatila on the digital social network Twitter. Faced with this scenario, the objective of this research is to identify and analyze technodiscursive marks of cyberviolence in troll comments made in the publications of the scientific popularizer Atila Iamarino about Covid-19 on Twitter and to verify their relationship with the technodiscursive expansion. For the fulfillment of these objectives, we base ourselves on the assumptions of Fiorin (2017) and Perelman e Tyteca (2005), with regard to arguments that aim exclusively to disqualify the opponent, the reflections of Seara (2015, 2017, 2020, 2021 ) and Cabral (2015, 2017a, 2017b, 2018, 2019) on conflicting interactions in social media, and the characteristics described by Charaudeau (2009, 2016) of the science communication discourse. In order to theoretically reflect on discursive cyberviolence, we adopted the Digital Discourse Theory (DDA) proposed by the French linguist Marie-Anne Paveau (2013, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2021). The research is methodologically defined as exploratory, bibliographical and with a dialectical approach, and its data generation period is from January to June 2020. In our quantitative analysis, we identified 2,026 troll-comments directed at @oatila during this period, 900 of which were concentrated in April's tweets. Thus, we qualitatively analyzed the 4 tweets with the most troll comments of that month and the first 5 comments of each one of them, totaling 20 troll comments. We identified that discursive cyberviolence manifests itself through techno-language elements, in a composite and intrinsic relationship between user-device-ecosystem. Regarding the process of expanding the discussion on Covid-19, we conjecture that there is no productive exchange between these users and @oatila, as their sole objective is to aggressively attack it, deny the scientific knowledge disclosed, defend anti-scientific guidelines and a political-ideological positioning. Therefore, discursive cyberviolence practiced within an essentially polarizing space can originate from a form of doxa instituted by a set of troll comments within the Twitter ecosystem.