Social media companies also failed in Brazil

Even before the incident, ahead of the presidential elections last October, Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp were filled with misinformation about the integrity of the vote in Brazil, in which Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva narrowly defeated Bolsonaro. It doesn’t help that Meta allows misinformation from political candidates to go unchecked, a policy that should have changed long ago.

But it’s not just Meta.

A search for #bolsonaro on TikTok Monday morning led to at least two popular videos praising the protesters as “patriots” or arguing that they were fighting for the “Liberty”. YouTube channels promoting Bolsonaro’s voter fraud allegations had tens of millions of views before the election. And Brazilian election deniers have seen their following grow on Twitter, according to an analysis by Rest Of World, a nonprofit journalism organization.

All of this highlights a bigger problem: social media companies continue to underinvest in controlling misinformation, which can get out of control by turning to cheaper methods, such as software and contractors, to remove harmful content and, what more serious, they do not sufficiently fund these efforts outside the United States.

The complainant Francis Haugen, which in 2021 exposed a series of neglected wrongs by Facebook, focused on the company’s inadequate efforts to rein in misinformation in foreign countries like India. He warned of upcoming elections around the world, saying the site “takes shortcuts and provides uneven and inadequate defenses.” In the case of Twitter, its new owner, Elon Musk, reportedly fired the company’s Brazilian staff after taking over it.

Ironically, Facebook and Twitter They made impressive strides in preventing major disinformation campaigns from disrupting the US midterm elections last year, according to multiple polls. But these platforms have a long way to go in other areas.

“Sometimes we see content stick around in Spanish and Portuguese much longer than English, even when its English counterpart has been removed.”says Roberta Braga, a Brazilian-American researcher at Equis Research, a Latino-focused public opinion research group.

“They don’t target anywhere like they do in America“, it states Jiore Craighead of electoral research at the Institute for Strategic Dialoguea London-based think tank that tracks misinformation on the internet.

He says that the online narratives that preceded the riots in Brazil were similar to those used in the run-up to January 6, and that they also appeared before the elections in France Y Australiawhere billboards display words like “traitors” Y “fraud” and hashtags in English such as #StopTheSteal (translated into Spanish as “stop the robbery”).

A big difference with the United States is that WhatsApp it has become one of the most popular platforms for spreading misinformation about the elections, according to Braga.

While the most radical Brazilians flock to Telegram, an unmoderated messaging and broadcasting app, to engage with like-minded groups, the vast majority use WhatsApp to communicate with friends and family and conduct business, where many election denial narratives have taken hold. Braga, whose own family and friends in Brazil have become radicalized supporters of Bolsonarosays that WhatsApp could do more to mitigate the reach of its dissemination tools, than “exacerbate the circulation of misinformation, whether we like it or not”.

WhatsApp has been trying since 2018 to impose stricter limits on message forwarding to make it harder for misinformation about election integrity or COVID-19 vaccines to go viral. It also adds a tag that says “forwarded many times” to help curb the spread of rumors and fake news. The company should do more, but that would mean upsetting free speech and privacy advocates: much of the inflammatory content is spread in private groups that WhatsApp cannot see or interfere with, since all communications they are encrypted.

What complicates matters is that viral content on WhatsApp o Telegram often starts somewhere else, like YouTube or TikTok. “Much of the activity is cross-platform.” says craig. “In one place you can see the message and in the other amplify it. Removing one does not remove the other.

To head off the problem, social media companies will have to redouble their efforts to communicate with each other about upcoming elections and allegations of voter fraud. The researchers also say that social media companies need to be more transparent about how content flows and gains followers on their sites, to help them find new ways to prevent it from getting out of control.

But it must be recognized that much of the problem is beyond their reach. Bolsonarolike donald trumplaid much of the groundwork for the stolen election narrative, after spending months claiming unfair treatment at the hands of Brazil’s electoral authority.

“What we are seeing in Brazil is very similar to what we saw in the United States”, Braga says: “the trajectory of how the electoral fraud narrative penetrated society, and the types of influential people who spread it.”

By Parmy Olson