Public communication facing disinformation: strategies and ruptures in the Senate communication contract on Facebook
This research examines public communication in addressing the problem of disinformation, focusing on the discourse strategies of the Federal Senate on Facebook and on the ruptures of the communication contract
established tacitly between this parliament and the citizens. The research corpus consists of forty-seven posts on the Senate fanpage, published between 2013 and 2019, which deal predominantly with misinformation and similar semantics (rumors, fake news, deep fakes and misleading information). The study used exploratory analysis to scrutinize the Senate's social identity as a communicating subject. From this constructed representation, the techniques of the Semiolinguistic Theory of Discourse, based on the work of Patrick Charaudeau, were used to analyze the publications. In order to examine the comments of the readers of the said communication device, framework analysis procedures were adapted. The work discussed the intended effects (instruction, refutation and information) by the Senate in the selected corpus, based on the following theoretical axes: public communication and its dimensions (public, institutional and political interest), disinformation as a public problem, the new ecosystem communication and disintermediation processes and disruptive democracy. In the end, it was found that the Senate's public communication, by making use of shared common knowledge and the system of values / beliefs about the world in which it operates, produces statements that seek to reinforce its image as a credible public information institution, in contrast the non-recognition of authority by a significant part of the readers of the fanpage in question.