When Elon Musk reached a deal to acquire Twitter, right-wing Telegram groups in Brazil went wild. Here at last was a muscular champion of free speech. Even more, here was someone who — users rushed to confirm — wanted Carlos Bolsonaro, son of the president, to be Twitter’s managing director in Brazil.
That was, of course, not true. But I wasn’t surprised. I had been following these groups on the messaging app for weeks, to watch how misinformation was spread in real time. In Brazil, fake news seems to be something that the population at large seems to fall victim to — Telegram just offers the sort of deepest rabbit hole you can go down. So I knew — from horrible, eye-sapping experience — that for many right-wing activists, fake news has become an article of faith, a weapon of war, the surest way of muddling the public discussion.
“Fake news is part of our lives”, President Jair Bolsonaro said last year, while receiving a communication award from his own Ministry of Communications. (It doesn’t get more Orwellian, does it?) “The internet is a success”, he went on. “We don’t need to regulate it. Let the people feel free”.
You can see his point. After all, fake news produced a headline supposedly in The Washington Post that read, “Bolsonaro is the best Brazilian president of all times” — and claimed that a recent pro-Bolsonaro motorcade rally made the Guinness World Records. But my plunge into the country’s Telegram groups revealed something more sinister than doctored articles. Unregulated, extreme and unhinged, these groups serve to slander the president’s enemies and conduct a shadow propaganda operation. No wonder Mr. Bolsonaro is so keen to maintain a free-for-all atmosphere.
The chief target is Mr. Bolsonaro’s main opponent in October’s elections, the former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. In medium-size pro-Bolsonaro groups, such as “The Patriots” (11,782 subscribers) and “Bolsonaro 2022 support group” (25,737 subscribers), the focus is unrelenting. Users exhaustively shared a digitally altered picture of a shirtless Mr. da Silva holding hands with President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela as if they had been a homosexual couple in the 1980s. (Do I need to say it’s false?)
The claims are endless, and outlandish: Mr. da Silva is sponsored by drug traffickers; he will persecute churches; he is against middle-class Brazilians having more than one television at home. People use what they can get. An obviously satirical video — which shows an actor, in the guise of an attorney for Mr. da Silva’s Workers’ Party, confessing to electoral fraud — is paraded as cold hard proof. The name of the attorney, which translates as something like “I Mock Them”, should have given the game away. But in their rush to demonize, Mr. Bolsonaro’s followers aren’t exactly given to close reading.
Underlying this frenetic activity is barely disguised desperation. Mr. da Silva currently leads Mr. Bolsonaro in the latest poll, 41 percent to 36 percent. The reality of Mr. da Silva’s popularity is clearly too painful to bear, so Telegram users take refuge in fantasy. “Finally a real poll”, one user said, asserting that an imaginary pollster put Mr. Bolsonaro in first place with 65 percent of voting intentions, against 16 percent for his opponent. When inventing polls won’t do, you can always call off the race. “Afraid of an international arrest, Lula is going to give up his candidacy”, another claimed. The wishfulness is almost touching.
Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters have another great boogeyman: the Supreme Court, which has opened several investigations of the president, his sons and his allies. On Telegram, this scrutiny has not been well received. People accuse the justices of publicly defending rape, pedophilia, homicide, drug trafficking and organ trafficking. They share a manipulated picture of one justice posing with Fidel Castro. They share an edited video in which another justice confesses that the Workers’ Party is blackmailing him for participating in an orgy in Cuba. (The justice did say that — but was actually giving a bizarre example of fake news against him, a rumor that Mr. Bolsonaro himself helped to create on Twitter.)
A few steps have been taken to curb this deluge of fake news. Some social media platforms have been removing videos from the president that spread misinformation about Covid-19 and the country’s electronic voting system. WhatsApp decided not to introduce in Brazil a new tool called Communities, which gathers several groups chats, until the presidential election is over. In March, the Supreme Court banned Telegram for two days because the company had been ignoring the court’s request to remove a misleading post on the country’s electoral system from the president’s official account (1.34 million subscribers). The company then agreed to adopt a few anti-misinformation measures, including a daily manual monitoring of the 100 most popular channels in Brazil and a future partnership with fact-checking organizations. A flawed “fake news bill” is being considered by Congress.
It’s not nearly enough. A federal police investigation recently identified an orchestrated scheme — the so-called cabinet of hate — formed by Mr. Bolsonaro’s closest allies, and probably also his sons and aides. The group’s alleged aim is to identify targets such as politicians, scientists, activists and journalists, and then to create and spread disinformation for “ideological, party-political and financial gains”. (They all deny the accusations.) The problem is much bigger than a few scattered posts by lunatics.
In the end, we don’t know what can be done to effectively contain enormous misinformation campaigns on social media platforms, especially before important national elections. How can we reason with people who believe that “leftists allow babies to be killed 28 days after being born” or that “vaccines implant parasites that can be controlled with electromagnetic impulses”? Some specialists advocate adding fact-check labels, making it harder to forward messages or bringing in user verification. None, I’d guess, would do much to hold back the tide of madness I found on Telegram.
There is one solution we can fall back on, at least: voting the fake-news politicians out of office.
Vanessa Barbara is the editor of the literary website A Hortaliça, the author of two novels and two nonfiction books in Portuguese and a contributing Opinion writer.