Historical revisionism on Jair Bolsonaro’s Twitter

we are still the same

Abstract

It is known that the conjuncture must be analyzed widely, so that when speaking in the current sociopolitical context, it is necessary to look at the past and see it as part of the whole. In this context, the civil-military dictatorship in Brazil certainly has roots that allowed the construction of a revisionist discourse on the period. The role of this work, therefore, is to propose a critique of transitional justice, in view of the denial of history that is currently observed and that allowed the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. For this, we performed the content analysis of the verified account on Twitter (current social network X), owned by the former president, with keywords on the dictatorship, to assess which speech he affiliates ideologically. The objective is to reflect on these two points: the memory about the civil-military dictatorship, in the implementation of transitional justice, and Bolsonaro’s revisionism. Thus, it was possible to conclude, from the results obtained, that in terms of memory, truth and justice, spaces were left open that could be filled with negationist discourses. This is the case of Bolsonaro’s Twitter, which presents historical revisionism and denies the civil-military dictatorship. This narrative, endorsed by voters in 2018, reveals the living symptom of the military period, which cannot be completely overcome, as expected, through transitional justice.