The preventive arrest of Jair Bolsonaro, ordered last Saturday, 22nd, leads a list of some of the main political events in Brazil this year, according to information from Quaest Pesquisa e Consultoria, a data intelligence company that publishes research on social media monitoring.
Quaest indicates that 448,000 mentions were made of the topic of Jair Bolsonaro’s preventive detention in the period, from 128,000 authors, reaching an “estimated audience of 116 million accounts”.
42% of them would have been made with a negative content to prison, that is, favorable to Bolsonaro in this context, and 35% with a positive content to prison, that is, unfavorable to Bolsonaro. The survey was carried out until 2 pm, before the release of the video in which Bolsonaro confesses that he damaged an electronic ankle bracelet with a “hot iron”.
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Bolsonaro’s preventive detention leads mentions/hour in 2025, says Quaest
The study places Bolsonaro’s preventive arrest as the leader in mentions made per hour in a comparison with other notable moments in Brazilian news this year, taking into account only the eight-hour period between 6am and 2pm last Saturday, the 22nd.
In second place comes part of the 1st day of Bolsonaro’s trial by the STF, on September 2nd. On that occasion, there were two sessions, the first scheduled from 9am to 12pm, and the other from 2pm to 7pm. A measurement taken at 4:30 pm, before the end of the second session, but covering the period since midnight on that day, indicated 44 thousand mentions of the topic per hour.
According to Quaest, the mega police operation against organized crime in Rio de Janeiro, on October 28, which resulted in the death of 122 people, including five police officers, had minor repercussions. A measurement taken at 12pm on the day following the start of operations considered an average of 37 mentions per hour, covering a period of 36 hours.
Check out the table released by Quaest below. The initial number refers to the mentions/hour, and the number in parentheses to the total number equivalent to the period mentioned by Quaest.
56 thousand – “Bolsonaro Preventive Prison” (448 thousand in the eight hours between 6 am and 2 pm on November 22)
44 thousand – “Bolsonaro Judgment” (726 thousand in the first 4:30 pm on September 2nd)
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37 thousand – “Megaoperation RJ” (1.332 million in the 36 hours between October 28th and 12pm on October 29th)
31 thousand – “Magnitsky Law Application” (2.79 million in the 90 hours between July 28th and 6pm on August 1st)
24 thousand – “PEC da Blindagem” (1.56 million in the 65 hours between September 16th and 5pm on September 19th)
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17 thousand – “Government-Congress Dispute” (5.712 million in the 14 days between June 24th and July 8th)
5.5 thousand – “Felca – Adultization” (924 thousand in the seven days between August 6th and 13th)
The methodology is described only briefly and without further details, as follows: “Social Listening: Mentions on the subject of interest were collected from the main social networks (Twitter [X]Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, Tumblr, TikTok, Bluesky and YouTube) and a news website using Quaest’s own API using Boolean operators with keyword searches related to the subject.” Among the data sources, in addition to the platforms already mentioned, also include Wikipedia and Google.
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