Pastor Moises Martins

Who are deputies and senators 'celebrities' on Twitter

Although it guarantees more visibility, it is still not possible to say if an above-average performance in social networks guarantees more votes in the elections.

In the US, everyone already knows: President Donald Trump has Twitter on his favorite platform to make comments, accusations and complaints.
The audience is big: the Republican has 26.3 million followers on the site - although it is still behind the predecessor, Barack Obama, and his 85.5 million. But in Brazil? Could the microblogging have also been well explored as a platform?
It is true that the number of followers of Brazilian politicians, especially deputies and senators, is infinitely less than that of the two American leaders. Even so, three out of four politicians from the National Congress have an open Twitter profile, equivalent to 86% of the 594 parliamentarians, according to research done at the Federal University of Bahia.
Responsible for the study, Professor Marcelo Amaral, who is currently teaching at the State University of Southwest of Bahia, explains however that not every congressman is an active user and can not be considered a national celebrity on the microblog.
According to him, unlike what happens in the US - where the presence of right-wing politicians prevails on Twitter - in Brazil, deputies and senators on the left are the ones who first came to the social network and tend to use it more often.
But the same is not true with the select group of congressmen who count the highest number of followers. Among the "celebrities" on the site there is no specific ideological legend or position. And not everyone is able to increase their own virtual public in significant numbers over time.



For the research, the professor analyzed the adhesions to the social network and the profile of the followers of deputies and senators in the months before the 2014 elections, during the campaign itself, and in the first months of the legislature, still in 2015.

He found that deputies were followed by an average of 5,690 accounts and senators, for 18,747 - making the numbers of most popular followers seem even more impressive.
At the request of the BBC Brazil, Amaral re-evaluated the profiles of the main "celebrities" of the National Congress on Twitter.

According to him, Senator Romário (PSB-RJ), with 2.55 million followers, remains the most frequent congressman - a title he has been carrying since 2013.

When the research began, Romario was a federal deputy and, at the time, had more followers than the entire PT party. Since April 2015, more than 500 thousand people have come to accompany him.
The ranking is no longer the same as that compiled shortly after the 2014 elections. Names such as MPs Marco Feliciano (PSC-SP) and Tiririca (PR-SP) and Senator Álvaro Dias (ex-PSDB, current PV- , For example, left the list of "five more."

Dias, however, is still singled out as an extremely active user on the microblogging, as well as Senator Jose Serra (SP), who ranks second in the ranking of parliamentarians with the highest number of followers, 1.57 million.

He has increased by 200,000 the number of people who have been on Twitter since taking office as a senator in 2015 - the researcher recalls that Serra had already reached Congress with more than 1 million followers.

Senator Cristovam Buarque (PPS-DF), one of the most interacting with his followers, occupies the third place, with approximately 643,000 observers.

In the fourth position is the also Senator Aécio Neves (PSDB-MG), with 538 thousand. Amaral stresses, however, that unlike the colleague of the plenary, the tucano almost does not post, interact or follow other users in the microblog. Each of them has gained, in almost two years, about 200 thousand followers.

Fifth is deputy Jean Wyllys (PSOL-RJ), who has attracted more than 238,000 new supporters since the start of his second term in the House.

But many people who did not rank among the top five had significant growth. Deputy Jair Bolsonaro (PSC-RJ) has 376,000 followers today - in 2014, it had about 67,900.

"Bolsonaro is being leveraged on Twitter with the controversies he has been involved in since 2015. Aécio Neves, although very popular, has suffered intense criticism in his posts, but continues to grow," says Amaral.

The survey also points to a standard profile of the most active and popular Brazilian parliamentarians on the microblog: young, with above-average schooling, representative of the country's populous geographic region, affiliated with a medium or large political party and with significant voting in the last elections.

Normally, they have been using Twitter since before the 2010 elections and post a number of messages above the average of other parliamentarians - a profile that approaches Senator Romario.
Limit

The adhesion of congressmen to the microblog did not vary significantly with the arrival of new deputies and senators after the elections of 2014.

The number of followers, however, continues to grow. The survey pointed out that the number of Twitter users in Brazil following a congressman has doubled between 2013 and 2015 and also indicated that this number is proportional to the population of each region of the country.

"The more difficult access to new technologies in some regions of the country does not prevent users from connecting to the accounts of parliamentarians in their region, in the same proportion as those from other regions with greater access to technological resources," observes Amaral. That the number of followers of politicians is equal to 1.8% of the Brazilian population.

In 2016, Brazil was the country where Twitter achieved its third largest growth in number of users.
As in the US, the vast majority of accounts in Brazil - 73.88% - follow only one parliamentarian.
The study also indicates that senators post more and have more followers than deputies - Amaral did not analyze the content of the messages posted.

Matches
But the survey also shows that there are "follow-up parties" and "follower parties" of other politicians on Twitter. The PSOL is the prime example of the first group, while the PSD and PRP are two examples of the second group.

"In general, whoever is left or far left is more followed by the right," Amaral says.
The PT, PSOL, PSDB, B PC and DEM stand out by the levels of activity, popularity and connection between their profiles. At the other extreme, PMDB, PP, PSD, PR and PTB appear as the lesser-captioned percentages of politicians with active Twitter accounts.

For the professor, the numbers indicate an aversion by many of its parliamentarians to modernity.
Therefore, Professor José Antônio Gomes de Pinho, who directed the research of Amaral, says he is curious to know the behavior of P