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Disinformation in Latin America
Brazil’s false claims of electoral fraud
In some ways Brazil’s recent history of social media disinformation has been closely tracking the pathway laid out in the US, only with a two-year time delay. Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 victory can similarly be attributed to a slick media campaign, whilst maintaining an image of himself as a far-right anti-establishment figure. Then, in 2022 he claimed to have been the victim of electoral fraud after his defeat by Lula, and even incited his supporters to violence, resulting in thousands of people breaking into the presidential palace (Planalto), congress, and the supreme court on 8 January 2023, exactly mirroring the storming of the Capitol in the US two years and two days before. In the Brazilian case it has been shown that far-right protesters believed their action would trigger an army putsch which would bring Bolsonaro back into office.
- Introduction
- What’s in the toolbox?
- Hate speech in the mix
- Coming next: social media and artificial intelligence
- The ubiquity of social media
- The Cambridge Analytica story
- Brazil’s false claims of electoral fraud
- The ‘office of hate’
- AMLO’s information wars by press conference
- Petro: a president with a loudspeaker
- Media made in Russia
- The Chinese presence
- Down the road of domestic polarisation
- An army of hipster influencers
- How to regulate social media
- Fake news is worryingly resilient