Brazil’s Presidential Race Divides Families, Encourages Fake News

By Lise Alves, Senior Contributing Reporter

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL – With less than five days before Brazil elects its new president, many Brazilians are starting to get weary of politics, with supporters from both candidates flooding the Internet with fake news and information.

“I am avoiding talking about politics at family gatherings,” São Paulo cabbie Ricardo Almeida told The Rio Times. “Last week I had a pretty heated argument with my brother-in-law,” adds Almeida who is a staunch supporter of right-wing candidate, Jair Bolsonaro.

“I don’t think I’m going to be invited to their house this Christmas,” concluded Almeida with a chuckle.

Being depicted as the angriest run-off in Brazilian electoral history, this year’s presidential race has right-wing extremist Bolsonaro with a wide lead over left-wing Fernando Haddad. Bolsonaro, known for his controversial statements against minorities has increased tensions between voters from the two candidates.

A large number of Brazilians, especially of women, adhered to the “#EleNao” (#NotHim) and “#EleNunca” (#NeverHim) movement against Bolsonaro, calling him a racist, anti-LGBT, chauvinist dictator. Over the past weekend the movement held rallies throughout the country, taking thousands to the streets.

Many Brazilians, like graphic designer Flavia Ribeiro, admit to posting videos and information which may not be true in her social media, but justifies the move as just ‘equaling the playing field’.

“Bolsonaro’s supporters play dirty, they are very aggressive on Whatsapp and Facebook, telling all sorts of lies about the PT, (former president) Lula and Haddad,” she says. “I’m just putting out information that I receive against Bolsonaro, but I don’t always check to see if it’s true.”

According to Ribeiro she is no longer on ‘speaking terms’ with a few co-workers and some of her neighbours due to the polarization of the election.

Even the PT candidate, Fernando Haddad, replicated information on national TV, that later was found to be untrue.

Earlier this week, popular folk singer Geraldo Azevedo accused Bolsonaro’s Vice-President, Antonio Mourão, of personally torturing him in 1969, during the country’s dictatorship. The information hit the Internet like a bomb.

Mourão defended himself, stating that in 1969 he was fifteen years old and at the military academy. Azevedo admitted his mistake, but not before Haddad had accused the former army general-turned-politician of being a torturer in a nationally-televised interview.

Social media administrators have tried to halt fake information from being replicated on their websites, but that has not been an easy task.

Facebook, for example, set up a ‘war room’ to identify the spread of fake news about elections and quickly shut it down. The original idea was to identify fake news on its network relating to the November elections in the US, but employees have also been instructed to look for sites in Portuguese with fake Brazilian election news.

“Content that was telling people that due to protests, that the election would be delayed a day,” Samidh Chakrabarti, who oversees Facebook’s elections and civic engagement team, told US news outlet CNBC.

“This was not true, completely false. We were able to detect that using AI and machine learning. The war room was alerted to it and our engineers and operations specialists were able to remove this at scale from our platform before it could go viral,” concluded the Facebook executive.

WhatsApp, one of the most popular social media venues in Brazil, says it is also doing all it can to curb fake information from being transmitted through its groups. “WhatsApp has proactively banned hundreds of thousands of accounts during the Brazilian election period,” said the company through its press office last week.

Whatever the result of Sunday’s elections, political analysts fear that the animosity and hostility between the supporters of the two groups will take many months to subside. If they are right, Almeida, the São Paulo cabbie is likely to spend this Christmas alone.