The big digital electoral battle in Brazil
(Article translated from a text originally published in Portuguese, using Google Translator.)
With just a few days to go before the second round of the 2022 presidential election, the internet has become the preferred arena of a political battle in which the occupation of virtual spaces has become more important than persuasion in winning over new voters.
It is an offshoot of the extraordinary increase in the production and circulation of fake news promoted, especially, by far-right Bolsonarist groups. Faced with the material impossibility of deconstructing the entire avalanche of pro-Bolsonaro fake news, the opposition’s best strategy became to occupy spaces on social networks in order to neutralize the action of electronic robots that mass distribute lying messages.
The two candidates, former president Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, en incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro, paid special attention to their presence on podcasts (audio interviews) as a way of fueling the digital activism of their followers. Lula’s interview with the Flow podcast, hosted by the hugely popular influencer Igor Coelho, had more than one million viewers on October 18th. Two days later, Jair Bolsonaro surpassed the record of his antagonist also in a podcast, Intelligence Ltd, produced by comedian Rogério Vilela.
But the main impact of the two podcasts was not limited to what was said by Lula and Bolsonaro. Outside their respective studios, followers of both candidates staged campaigns to mobilize supporters to produce records of participation through likes and promote a new way of occupying spaces on the internet’s social networks.
The conquest of virtual spaces through the barrage of likes, deliberately or not, works as an antidote against the misinformation caused by the avalanche of fake news that took over the Brazilian web with just a few days to go before the 30th of October vote. By saturating spaces in networks, it is possible to create congestion of messages favorable to a candidate, making it difficult for the receiver to access material from the other candidate.
The couch militancy
Bolsonaristas massively appealed to the use of electronic robots that greatly expand the ability to replicate messages, most of which are false. Lula’s followers, on the other hand, having much less money to finance the dissemination of messages, turned to militancy as the main political weapon in the war of likes and retweets. Volunteers organized true informal networks, the so-called sofa militancy, to distribute instructions on how to maximize the production of likes and place the Lula campaign among the topics that most attracted the attention of Internet users in Google searches.
The tremendous digital battle for votes marks a major shift in how future electoral campaigns will be developed. As it is impossible to deconstruct fake news quickly and convincingly when its promoters use electronic robots, for example, the most efficient alternative is to create a counter-avalanche of messages. This is a resource that may work in terms of reducing the effectiveness of disinformation campaigns. Still, it has a disturbing contraindication, as it amplifies the information chaos that further disorients social media users.
The growth of digitization in electoral campaigns will surely have many other effects that are still impossible to delineate. One thing, however, seems certain: the impact of messages will become even more important in winning votes. The internet is not very conducive to reflection, especially on social networks with a large number of users, which are the favorites of politicians who are candidates for some elective office. Another worrying trend is the sophistication of fake news through deepfake, doctoring images, as occurred recently when a digital version of the presenters of Jornal Nacional was created announcing an opinion poll that was also false and that favored Jair Bolsonaro.
Deepfakes are still very expensive and sophisticated, but they should become cheaper with the popularization of technology, increasing the uncertainties of the common voter in front of an image. Businessman Bruno Sartori, a specialist in digital graphic design, is critical of the use of doctored images for political purposes and is concerned about the role they will play in a possible Bolsonaro government. According to Bruno, we are facing an “extremely dangerous situation because we have not yet seen even 5% of what deepfakes are capable of”.
