RIO DE JANEIRO — In 2018, Brazilian voters were inundated with lies ahead of the presidential election, many of which favored then-candidate Jair Bolsonaro, helping propel him to power.
This year, misinformation has persisted, but it has also been less prevalent, experts say. This is due in part to efforts by tech companies to more aggressively crack down on intentionally misleading posts, as well as aggressive moves by Brazil’s Supreme Court and election officials to force companies to remove content.
One Supreme Court judge in particular, Alexandre de Moraes, ordered major social networks to delete thousands of posts, saying they were spreading “fake news” or that the people who posted them had threatened the court. Few, if any, major democracies have weighed in so directly and frequently on what can be said online, and it has sparked a debate in Brazilian society about the extent to which it is too far for the government to crack down on misinformation.
So far, results have been mixed, experts say. “It was necessary, it was positive, but it was not enough,” explains Marco Aurelio Ruediger, director of the school of communication at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro. “Because the volume of fake news is so high.”
On the one hand, the algorithms aimed at filtering misinformation are flawed. And even when such content is removed from one platform, it often finds a captive audience on another, less rigorous one. Fake content has also become more subtle, promoting distorted or misleading facts that are often harder to debunk.
“These are not outright lies,” says Tai Nalon, head of Aos Fatos, a disinformation research group in Brazil. “But they misrepresent a fact or raise a question or omit context.”
Misinformation in Brazil also spreads more directly among people who might know each other, which gives it less reach but also means it has more weight with recipients. “It’s no longer lies sent to everyone,” says Ms. Nalon. “We see misinformation circulating in niche groups, in religious groups.”
The most worrying category of disinformation this year have been posts suggesting that the Brazilian left is planning to rig the election against Mr. Bolsonaro. The president himself pushed this theory, fueling discussion on the Brazilian internet.
“Stop Theft” videos repeating the president’s false fraud allegations have attracted millions of views on YouTube and Facebook, according to SumOfUs, an advocacy group that aims to hold corporations accountable. The group released a report last week that Google and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, had allowed thousands of ads, videos and posts questioning Brazil’s electoral process to run on their platforms.
Cyabra, a social media analytics firm, analyzed posts from 4,440 accounts that discussed Brazil’s voting systems on Twitter, TikTok or Facebook over the past few weeks, and found that 6% of posts came from accounts inauthentic, affecting 1.3 million people.
Some posts also attacked Mr. Bolsonaro’s main rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a left-wing former president. Some messages falsely claimed that he planned to close churches and turn the country into a repressive communist state.
Although misleading content favoring Mr da Silva exists online, Ms Nalon says it is rare to see the left peddling blatant lies or baseless conspiracies. Instead, posts on the left have focused on showcasing Mr Bolsonaro’s poor track record, including his sloppy handling of the pandemic.
“There is a lot of profanity” from Mr. Bolsonaro, says Ms. Nalon. “But it’s more of a propaganda tone.”
Mr Bolsonaro has dismissed polls showing him trailing Mr da Silva, who has led in double figures for months. Echoing the president, a recent viral clip from Brazil’s biggest nighttime newscast was doctored to show the presenter presenting a fake opinion poll putting Mr Bolsonaro far ahead of his left-wing rival.
Yet many Brazilians have learned valuable lessons during the pandemic, which has seen a constant barrage of misinformation about the coronavirus and the vaccine, much of it peddled by Mr. Bolsonaro himself.
“People are more critical now, they’re more alert,” Ruediger says. “They don’t fall for all the lies.”