Terrorism, cyberterritories, fake news and the phenomenon of "instrumental" masses

Abstract

The terrorist attacks on the headquarters of the Three Powers of the Republic of Brazil, in the Federal Capital, on January 8, 2023, took place in the contingency of vertiginous mediatization. This article investigates connections between fake news about the 2022 electoral process and the occurrence of coup acts. In this sense, along with the Comprova Project, of journalistic verification of messages that go viral in the cyberterritories of social media, an effort was made to identify the context of disinformation related to the last electoral process, in order to verify the hypothesis that there is a relationship between the dissemination of false news and the terrorist attacks, guided by the refusal of the results of the presidential elections, with an illegal claim to a coup d'état. As verified, between October 1st and December 17th, there were 110 fake news with 100,624,032 engagements, with accusations of fraud, attacks on the Superior Electoral Court and the Federal Supreme Court, etc. With theoretical-conceptual support from the fields of social communication and psychoanalysis, in particular, the premise was also confirmed that fake news compose a strategy of "instrumental power", of "behavioral engineering", for the dissemination of obscurantism and the formation of extremist masses