National Identity in the Brazilian Gaming Community on Twitter: Esports Tournaments During the 2022 Elections

This study examines how Brazilian gamers discussed esports and national identity on Twitter during the 2022 presidential elections, focusing on the two voting rounds and the weeks surrounding each. Its central argument is that international esports tournaments featuring Brazilian teams, particularly in League of Legends and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, functioned as a unifying force within a gaming community that was otherwise fractured by political polarization. The analysis situates esports within a longer tradition in which football serves as a "national passion" and a marker of Brazilian identity, while noting that football's symbols, especially the yellow national team jersey, had become associated with the right-wing movement supporting Jair Bolsonaro.

The data were gathered through the Twitter API using queries for posts about games, the industry, and streaming, yielding roughly 691,000 interactions in the first round period and roughly 806,000 in the second. Network graphs built in Gephi identified six clusters in the first round and eight in the second, and content analysis was applied to the top 100 tweets within each cluster. Clusters aligned largely with supporters of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Bolsonaro, with Lula's supporters holding most of the interactions and Bolsonaro's supporters appearing more isolated within the network. Esports-centered clusters grew in prominence during the second round, outperforming Bolsonaro-aligned clusters.

Top-performing content frequently portrayed Brazilian esports teams as representatives of the nation and sources of collective pride, and these teams were associated with national colors without the controversy attached to the football national team. Drawing on Georg Simmel's sociology of conflict, the authors argue that external competition strengthens internal social bonds, so that the common enemy presented by rival international teams fostered solidarity across political lines. The authors interpret this as a temporary truce in which professional competition encouraged mutual respect among players of differing political views.

The study is presented as part of an ongoing monitoring effort, and the authors acknowledge that a data-collection fault left October 5 without recorded interactions. Its scope is limited to a single platform and a two-week window around each voting round.