Political activity in social media induces forest fires in the Brazilian Amazon

Abstract

Authors have presented several discussions and they suggest that Google Trends data did not only reflect the current state of events, but may have also been able to anticipate certain future trends. A major peak of devastation and fire occurred on August-2019 in Brazilian Amazon forest and messages were spread out in social media and on the Internet announcing protests over “the day of fire”. Investigations of journalists indicate that a group formed by producers, land grabbers and prospectors set fire to roads in the Brazilian Amazon. Social media is part of the routine of statements by presidents and political representatives with a high impact on actions that directly affect the population. Our goal is to use Google Trends as an indicator or predictor of actions as that were part of the fires in the Amazon in 2019. In this article we investigate what is a possible influence of President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro in the increase of fire outbreaks due their speeches, using cross-correlations between the President's speech with keywords in Google Trends and current data of fires alerted by INPE– Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (National Space Research Institute). We found a cross-correlation of 55.73% that support this fact after looking up keywords related in Goggle Trends. The cross-correlation indicates that the maximum value is seven days from the peak of the search for the keyword, on the same date of "day of fire". When data are observed hour by hour, the cross-correlation between keywords and the beginning of "day of fire" is 53.96%, with a lag between 10 h and 32 h until the increase of fires in Legal Amazon. The cross-correlation for Google Trends between the keyword “Germany” and the keyword “Altamira+Fires+BR-163″ was of 72.87%, showing high relationship in the attacks to Mrs. Angela Merkel (Germany) and Altamira (region of Amazon) with highest fires outbreaks appearing along the BR-163 highway.