The social media savvy leader of Brazil has often faced the heaviest online backlog of his presidency, after unsuccessfully trying to sniff out questions about his family’s financial dealings by warning a journalist that he’s his face in ‘woe smite.
Jair Bolsonaro published the threat on Sunday after a reporter from one of Brazil’s leading newspapers asked him to explain why a former police officer with alleged references to Rio’s mafia made thousands of pounds in the bank accounts of his wife, Michelle Bolsonaro had paid.
But the harsh remark soon returned as Brazilian journalists flooded social media with the same question.
“President Jair Bolsonaro, why did your wife Michelle receive 89,000 reais from Fabrício Queiroz?” they tweeted unanimously to the Fiers judge leader of Brazil.
Fabio Malini, a social media researcher who follows the backlog, said hundreds of thousands of internet users soon joined the counterattack against Bolsonaro.
By late Sunday, he had identified more than 1.1m tweets on the subject, with a similar stream on Facebook and Instagram. At the height of the uprising, about 3,000 comments were tweeted every minute.
“I was really shocked by the scale of this,” said Malini, of the Federal University of Espírito Santo.
‘Without a doubt, it was the moment we saw the largest number of people attacking him right [since he took power]. Whether people attack his ideas. What happened yesterday is that he was immediately challenged on his social media accounts … and this should worry him … It was a very unusual situation. “
The uprising appeared to stun Bolsonaro’s army of online cheerleaders and remove the administrators of his social networks – where he has more than 40 million followers – from deleting critical comments and blocking critics’ accounts.
Malini said one of the most striking things about the rebellion on Sunday was the momentary formation of a united anti-Bolsonaro front – something that has so far proved undesirable for the right-wing populist, divided, ideologically diverse opponents.
Those asked answers about the mysterious payments to Bolsonaro’s wife came from both right and left: prominent political opponents, celebrities and singers, but also anonymous social media users who rarely waded into such field battles.
Bolsonaro tried to regain control of the story on Monday, declaring bankruptcy that ‘plonker’ journalists were at greater risk of dying because of a coronavirus epidemic he is accused of catastrophic abuse. But those efforts appeared to fall flat, with social media users continuing Bolsonaro with the demand for the payments to his wife.
“People continue to produce and share demand. It has become a kind of ongoing spectacle because he has no answer to offer, “Malini said.
With the Brazilian Covid-19 death toll of more than 114,000 now the second highest in the world, the researcher said he believed the uprising was nearly more than the Bolsonaro family’s finances.
There was something cathartic about what was happening. Many people wanted to express their anger and resentment against this government and used this as a kind of trigger to express their disappointment, disillusionment and their lack of hope. ”
Reports that Queiroz had paid money into an account held by Michelle Bolsonaro first appeared in late 2018 after anti-corruption investigators who investigated him identified a 24,000 real (£ 3,285) payment.
Bolsonaro, then elected president, claimed that bail had been repaid for a loan of 40,000 reais he had lent to Queiroz. But neither Bolsonaro nor the first lady have commented on recent allegations that she received 89,000 reais from Queiroz and his wife.
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