Brazil’s Misinformation Crisis is Part of a Bigger Global Problem - 12-16-22

By Egerton Neto 

From attacks on the electoral process to scaremongering about social minorities, the Brazilian presidential elections were a boiling pot of fake news. Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro fired up his conservative Christian base by framing the election as “a fight between good and evil.” Never reluctant to use extreme statements when it suits him, Bolsonaro used religion to push his opponent, former president Lula da Silva, into an increasingly absurd competition to show who is the greater Christian. Misinformation targeting minorities was central to the campaign on both rounds of voting. As we head towards Lula’s inauguration, a significant part of the population still believes the elections were fraudulent.

This is not a one-sided problem. Lula’s campaign also descended into using shock tactics and media manipulation. In a dispute for Christian voters, Lula’s supporters published old footage of Bolsonaro speaking in a Masonic Temple, claiming that the current president was a devil worshiper. Lula has even published a statement of faith, including that he has “never made a pact, nor conversed with the Devil’. Absurd as these claims may seem, they got attention. On first round election day, October 2, searches of Lula and satanism increased by 2,500%. A few days later, google searches for Bolsonaro and satanism increased by 5,000%. 

Caught in the crossfire of this horrendous political battle are numerous victims, including the country’s LGBT+ community. Bolsonaro blatantly fueled misinformation about Brazil’s transgender and queer communities, claiming falsely that a Lula victory would lead to genderless toilets in schools and repeated false claims made in his 2018 campaign that the LGBT+ community wanted to promote homosexuality among children. 

These allegations are not without consequence. Brazil has the highest murder rate of transgender people in the world and life expectancy of a trans woman is only 35. In 2021, while Bolsonaro dismantled Brazil’s human rights protections, the NGO ANTRA recorded 140 murders of trans people. In this year’s election, 80% of trans candidates running for office reported being threatened or intimidated by far right groups.

A further tragic result of this campaign is that the millions of Brazilians facing food insecurity and the President’s shocking mismanagement of the pandemic, which killed 700,000 people, have barely received airtime. Looking to the future, and perhaps most worrying, is the campaign’s corrosive effect on trust in Brazil’s institutions, encouraged by Bolsonaro’s long running battle with several judges on the Supreme Court, and his attacks on the electoral process. Borrowing heavily from the Trump playbook, Bolsonaro has sowed seeds of doubt about the credibility of the electoral commission. 

After Lula’s victory in the second round, Bolsonaro’s supporters have blocked roads and held encampments in front of barracks demanding a coup d’état. These demands are heavily based on false claims that the elections were flawed, denied by every credible source but still believed by significant numbers at the far-right. The current President himself has been reluctant to recognize the results and has not condemned the protests. This week, after supporters set fire to cars in Brasilia and attacked the police’s headquarters, Bolsonaro has remained silent.

Brazil is not alone in creating an increasingly hostile and unstable information environment for political ends, especially in targeting LGBT+ communities. In Poland ahead of the 2019 general elections,  misinformation campaigns fueled anti-queer sentiment across the country in an attempt to rally voters. This strategy was later translated into discriminatory policy with the Parliament approving an “anti-gay propaganda” law. 

In Ghana, online and traditional media almost uniformly broadcast hate against queer people. The consequences are being felt offline. The country is close to approving one of the world’s harshest anti-LGBT+ laws, with a concurrent spike in phobic attacks and so-called “corrective rapes.” The bill has been described as a risk to Ghana’s democratic credentials. 

We all suffer the effects of this misinformation crisis. It is having a devastating effect on much wider debates including climate change, vaccination, and economic development. In a cover story in Science magazine, noted biologist Carl Bergstrom said misinformation “poses a risk to international peace, interferes with democratic decision-making, endangers the well-being of the planet, and threatens public health.” 

National governments will have to play a central role. Brazil’s next government will have the challenge of acting boldly to stop the deterioration of the information environment. However little has been said during the campaign and a bill introduced in Parliament to regulate fake news was rejected, with big tech platforms declining to cooperate.  We are now in dangerous territory, and what we really need is a global plan.

The 10-point action plan recently released by Nobel Prize Laureates Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov is a good starting point for Brazil or any other democracy hoping to tackle fake news. Lula’s new government and the Biden-Harris administration share the challenge of facing the misinformation crisis both at home and abroad. A coordinated response with other countries is needed. There is a lot to do, but the time is now. We don’t want to look back in a few years, wishing we had done more.

Egerton Neto is a Brazilian LGBT+ activist and Manager of Oxford University’s Programme on Democracy and Technology. He is an Aspen New Voices Fellow.

A previous version of this article was published in The Washington Blade