Fake news is the protagonist of the electoral duel between Jair Bolsonaro and Lula da Silva

Three months after the presidential elections in Brazil, disinformation about bitter rival candidates Jair Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva floods social networks and contaminates the political debate.

Since the beginning of the year, the number of false or misleading news verified by the AFP in relation to the electoral dispute has increased, more than four times between January and June. “Election content has come to occupy that space (previously dominated by the covid-19 pandemic), gaining preponderance,” says Sérgio Lüdtke, coordinator of Comprova, a collaborative verification project comprised of 42 media outlets, including AFP. .

A trend that in 2022 acquires new nuances, with new social networks and increasingly complex disinformation.

“The pandemic was probably a test period for these groups” who share the misinformation. And that “ended up making it a political issue,” Lüdtke said.

The disinformation acquired with covid-19 “a new form that permeates politics, economics and science”, agrees Joyce Souza, specialist in digital communication at the University of Sao Paulo.

Distrust

The viralized election content focuses primarily on lack of confidence in the electoral systemby raising questions about polls and e-voting.

This system has been rolled out across the country since 2000 with the aim of preventing fraud, which President Jair Bolsonaro, who supports the printing of votes, with public counting, has questioned without proof.

The far-right president himself, who will seek re-election, is also the subject of disinformation, as is former center-left president Lula da Silva, who ruled for two terms, from 2003 to 2010.

The latest poll of 23 June by the Datafolha institute gives 47% of voting intentions to Lula and 28% to Bolsonaro in the first round of 2 October.

The presidential election of 2018 was an example of the ability to multiply false and misleading publicationswith the potential to impact the Brazilian electorate.

However, these could be more easily verified with information from reliable sources.

misleading content

“What we see today is content that is not necessarily false in itself, but leads to misleading interpretations,” Lüdtke said.

This is the case of a tweet in May that questioned the credibility of a poll on voting intentions for having interviewed “only” about 1,000 people.

Although the data was correct, the conclusion was not, as a sample of this size is enough to make statistical inferences, the specialists explained to AFP.

Strategies like this make it difficult to verify information and often make it easier to convey biased content, especially when trying to arouse emotions, Souza explained.

“One of the strategies of the complex scenario of disinformation is to generate doubts in the network user, confusing things so much that they no longer know who to trust”, summarized Pollyana Ferrari, communications specialist and coordinator of the PUC Check network.

The risk of social networks

Since the 2018 elections, some platforms have gained popularity among Brazilians, such as Telegram and the video applications TikTok and Kwai, which allow for the rapid dissemination of visual content, with simple editing.

It happened with a video that appeared to show fans of the Brazilian team shouting “Lula, thief” in a packed stadium.

The images were viewed more than 100,000 times in just one of the posts, asking, “Is this the poll leader?”

But the audio had been changed with a TikTok editing tool.

For Ferrari, this type of use of TikTok is one of the hallmarks of the current wave of disinformation, as the allegations take the guise of entertainment.

The fake news virus

“Like a virus, the fake contaminates the ears, distorts the vision, creeps into the mind and hides in the laughter of the meme, which, being so harmless, ends up being a vector for the transmission of disinformation,” he assessed.

The Superior Electoral Court indicated in a recent document that “false or decontextualized information affects value judgments, leading people to make decisions based on misperceptions of reality”.

Souza believes that these contents “destroy rational debate in society and make hatred prevail over public debate”.

This sophisticated disinformation, concluded Lüdtke, has a lasting effect that “probably persists in various sectors of society”.

Source: AFP

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