How Networks Are Playing A Role in Brazil’s Upcoming Presidential Election
Resource: https://www.npr.org/2022/09/27/1124835910/2022-brazil-election-presidential-disinformation
Brazil has a very important presidential election coming up, one that may test the strength of the country’s young democracy. Its incumbent president, Jair Bolsonaro, has already made baseless claims about election fraud ahead of the first round of voting this Sunday. His allegations resemble those of Donald Trump regarding the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and the similarity between the two men who very much respect one another is evident.
As Bolsonaro currently trails behind his opponent, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (commonly referred to as Lula), in the polls, he and his supporters are taking every avenue possible to undermine the results of Sunday’s voting. In order for a winner to be declared then, he/she must receive at least 50% of the votes; otherwise, a second round will be held on October 30th. Bolsonaro, however, has already stated that if he has “less than 60% of votes [this Sunday], something abnormal took place…”
Misinformation such as this one has played a vital role in Bolsonaro’s presidential campaign ever since he first ran for office in 2018. By sharing misinformation through social media platforms involving large networks of potential voters, Bolsonaro and his supporters have relied on fake news to defame his opponents and boost his reputation. The reach these social networks can have is a topic that we’ve covered in class and one that is very relevant to the results of Brazil’s 2022 presidential election.
In 2018, before WhatsApp made important changes to its platform to curb the spread of misinformation, “marketing groups scraped phone numbers and sold campaigns the ability to send hundreds of thousands of WhatApp messages at a time…” Back then, users also had the ability to forward encrypted and often-misleading messages thousands of times to large WhatsApp groups. However, faced with WhatsApp and other messaging apps’ crackdown on misinformation following the 2018 election, Bolsonaro has recently urged his supporters to use the messaging app Telegram, which has become a hotbed of falsehoods. In fact, a recent investigation found that “a quarter of messages in Bolsonaro-supporting Telegram groups mentioned election fraud — some directly referring to Trump.”
In a sense, these groups can be thought of as highly-connected components of the overall Telegram network, in which users tend to share controversial political opinions not reciprocated by any rational person (node) outside the component. Any piece of misinformation quickly disseminates throughout the component and becomes fact for a considerable portion of the Brazilian population. “For this very radicalized part of the population, President Bolsonaro is ahead in the polls, way ahead in the polls, and if he does not win in the first round, that means there was fraud because the electronic voting machines don’t work,” says Campos Melo, a journalist who’s investigated the effect of misinformation during the 2018 election.
While networks have the capacity to spread crucial knowledge and inspire positive change, here we see the downsides of comprehensive networks whose main priority is to spread hateful and untrue information to advance a malicious political agenda. It’s increasingly important that we keep their ever-growing influence in mind in an age where misinformation can infect the minds of hundreds, thousands, or even millions in mere seconds.