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Musk, Zuckerberg, Trump: All eyes on Brazil disinformation [1]

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Date: 2025-01

Over the past few years, a series of crises have taken place here, a country where 84% of the population (212 million people) uses the internet and where, according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, 74% get news online.

Like the US, Brazil has seen a political group make use of disinformation as a tool to gain power and attack enemies, the press, and other institutions. Led by former president Jair Bolsonaro, several well-mapped disinformation campaigns managed to erode popular support for the electoral system, and sow doubts about the possibility of fraud in the 2022 elections.

The former president and his followers used the cry of “fake news” to attack the Supreme Court and the Electoral Court, and to instigate an insurrection that tried to overthrow the newly elected government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The similarities between the Capitol invasion of January 6, 2021 in the US, and the invasion of government buildings in Brasilia on January 8, 2023, are so striking that one could say both leaders followed the same playbook to subvert a legitimate election.

Fighting back

But, after the coup attempt failed, Brazil took a different route altogether. While in the US, the judicial system moved slowly, Brazil’s Federal Police built quite a strong case against Bolsonaro, with thousands of messages, documents, and testimonies informing an indictment against the former president for his role in an attempted coup d’etat. Even before that, in 2023, Bolsonaro had been banned from running for office again. In February, this year, his passport was seized. He cannot flee the country. Bolsonaro has adopted a narrative in which he is the victim of an “authoritarian” Supreme Court that wants to censor his freedom of speech.

Meanwhile, Brazilian journalists have learnt a lot about how digital populists are using media manipulation to destroy democracy. We’ve adopted a variety of strategies to deal with disinformation campaigns. We know how to quickly identify a fake news campaign online and its culprits, as well as how to reduce the use of the mainstream media to spread them.

We have learned to combine data journalism with shoe-leather reporting to identify how these misinformation networks are formed, coordinated, and funded – often with public money. We have adopted concepts from academia and allied ourselves with some of the key experts in the field of disinformation. We have created and shared methodologies to establish what is a simple organic misinformation wave and what is a systematic, structured, disinformation campaign. We developed linguistic models, monitoring stations, and AI-powered tools to help out.

We’ve come a long way.

Other institutions have also tried to fight back. Once again moving in a different direction than the US, our Congress responded to the January 8 invasion by trying to regulate Big Tech to improve safeguards for users and establish the corporations’ responsibility for criminal content spread by their algorithms. The move was seen as crucial to these platforms’ agendas because Brazil is one of their largest markets. So the legislation was stonewalled by commercial interests. Google went as far as to use its search homepage, used by more than 90% of internet users in Brazil, to say that a draft bill would “make the internet worse.”

That’s when Elon Musk entered the stage with the confrontation against the Brazilian Supreme Court.

Doubling down on an already explosive political situation, earlier in 2024 he decided to confront the Supreme Court and accuse its most prominent justice, Alexandre de Moraes, of “censoring” X after he refused to suspend accounts that were spreading disinformation and threats against authorities. Claiming his “absolutist” defense of freedom of speech, Musk joined the Brazilian alt-right in calling Moraes “a dictator.”

The beef escalated with the closure of X’s offices in Brazil, which was followed by the suspension of the platform in the entire country for over a month.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/musk-zuckerberg-trump-brazil-bolsonaro-disinformation/

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