Women journalists as targets of Bolsonaro: online harassment in the 2022 Brazilian presidential election campaign

Introduction During the 2022 Brazilian presidential electoral campaign, Bolsonaro adopted the strategy to address sexist and misogynistic attacks on female journalists. This study examines the overall discourse that emerged from those attacks among Twitter users. Methods We analyze 579,708 tweets referencing three prominent female journalists—Vera Magalhães, Gabriela Prioli, and Amanda Klein—who were publicly attacked by Bolsonaro. We conducted a computational analysis using R and Python that examines the time distribution of these tweets, the most frequent words, a sentiment analysis, and a BERTopic modeling in which tweets were clustered into 60 topics that were manually coded into main themes. Results Results show a pattern in the reactions on social media, where these attacks not only targeted female journalists but also sought to discredit the professional press more broadly. Discussion Bolsonaro replicated the strategy of other authoritarian populist leaders worldwide, who engage in online harassment campaigns that label journalists as ‘enemies of the people’.