Social representations of Brazilian Truth Commission on news comments

Abstract

The study investigated the social representations of the Brazilian Truth Commission from the news comments about its final report released in December 2014. Method: Comments (N = 322) were collected in the three major newspapers websites in Brazil: “Folha de São Paulo”, “O Globo” and “O Estado de São Paulo” during the 48 hours following the report’s publication. They were submitted to a lexical analysis on the software Radicalized discourses justifying the violations and narratives denying the existence of a dictatorship were observed. Discussion: Results were in line with social media theories about online behavior, but they do not corroborate previous research on the social representations of the military regime and Truth Commissions in South America. Received: 15 September 2021 Accepted: 22 November 2021

Keywords

• collective memory
• social representations of history
• ocial media
• transitional justice
• truth commissions