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Abstract The fires in the Amazon rainforest triggered a series of events with wide media coverage in 2019. This study aimed to analyze the social representations (SR) of the Brazilian people, from the analysis of 679 comments on news articles related to the wildfires, shared on the Facebook pages of the news outlets O Globo, El País Brasil, and BBC News Brasil, newspapers of great impact in Brazil. The Descending Hierarchical Classification of the IRaMuTeQ program produced three main types of SR from the comments, one being empirical, anchored in natural phenomena; a second being geopolitical and a third where controversies emerged in the SR that reflect the political polarization of the country. The debate mainly engages a polarized dispute between Internet users from the left wing and right wing.