Mediatization, post-truth, and knowledge production about Covid-19 249 fragile public trust as typical of post-traditional societies and argued that institutions like government needed to constantly perform “active trust” in the interface with the public. Within these social interactions, the production of a type of knowledge embedded in particular narratives is one of several methods of establishing a regime of truth. For Foucault (1995), what we consider true is something produced from multiple forms of discursive restriction, control, and distribution. Furthermore, truth often has conse- quences for power. Each society has its regime or “general policy” of truth. It refers to the kinds of discourses accepted and made to function as true; the mechanisms and instances that allow each person to distinguish between true and false statements, the way in which each one is sanctioned, the techniques and procedures that value the acquisition of the truth and the situation of those in charge of saying what is considered true. Regimes of truth are a consequence of the discourse and institutions that sustain them and are constantly reinforced and redefined through the educational system, the media, and the diffusion of political and economic ideologies. In this sense, the “battle for the truth” is not for an absolute truth that can be discovered and accepted, but rather a battle over the rules that govern how truth and falsehood are separated. This is a battle over the state of truth and, with it, the economic and political role that truth plays in a given social context. As I show in this text, in the face of the grave health crisis experienced with the expansion of SARS-Cov-2, the dis- courses promoted as true by state leaders do not simply seek more efficient methods of combating the new disease but aim to build truths that impact the legitimacy of government actions because of the pandemic. Bolsonaro resorted to testimony, a form of narrative based on personal experience, as a way of dis- qualifying measures and protocols based on scientific research and insisting as valid and true the initiative of the so-called “early treatme T n o t a .” nalyze the arguments from which Jair Bolsonaro’s rhetoric was articulated in his disputes in favor of the use of hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of COVID-19, I mapped a set of 32 posts published on the president’s official Facebook page
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