FIRE SEASON ON YOUTUBE: AN ANALYSIS OF THE CONTENT OF DISINFORMATION SPEECHES ABOUT THE FIRES IN THE AMAZON (2019 TO 2021)
Name: THAMARA MACHADO PINTO
Publication date: 25/04/2023
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| DANIELA ZANETTI | Presidente |
| RAFAEL CARDOSO SAMPAIO | Examinador Externo |
| RUTH DE CASSIA DOS REIS | Examinador Interno |
Summary: Just as the Amazon rainforest has its periods of instability during successive "fire seasons",
YouTube, in its own way, also goes through intense "heat waves" and flames in the context of
discursive disputes. Thus, like fire, disinformation on the video platform spreads at an
incalculable speed, a simple ignition point triggered by any individual is enough and YouTube
is totally set on fire by false information. With this in mind, this research investigates how
disinformation content about fires in the Amazon is formed during the years 2019, 2020 and
2021. To this end, we employed a methodology composed of the union of Content Analysis
(BAUER, 2008) and Moving Image Analysis (ROSE, 2008). After extracting and scraping data
using YouTube Data Tools software, we obtained 342 videos of misinformation about fires in
the Amazon. From this material we analyzed aspects concerning the discourse and audiovisual
language adopted in the videos that showed us the main strategies used by the content creators
of the platform, the youtubers, in order to give engagement to their productions. The results
obtained in this analysis showed that the argumentative webs most used to disinform about the
fires in the Amazon revolve around the discrediting of journalism and science, as well as the
reinforcement of military conspiracy narratives involving threats of invasions to the Amazon
territory and weakening of national sovereignty. Regarding the format of the videos, the largest
portion of our sample is of the audiovisual genre "vlog" followed by "news" which
demonstrates at the same time an attempt to approach the public by alluding to aspects such as
authority and credibility that journalistic language evokes. Finally, YouTube becomes a fertile
territory for the propagation of environmental disinformation based on its own modes of
infrastructure and regimes of visibility that favored the emergence of discourses that,
contradictorily, attacked consolidated epistemic authorities, such as the scientific and
journalistic fields, and used linguistic and audiovisual resources from these spheres in order to
emulate a narrative that corresponded to the factual truth (ARENDT, 2004) about the fires in
the Amazon during the period of time established as a cut-off for this study (2019 to 2021).
