“Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down.” Mark Zuckerberg’s mention of the region, in his announcement to end Meta’s fact-checking efforts in the US among other measures, was by no means a casualty. It’s a direct message to us Brazilians and shows that the eyes of the most powerful men in the world are on our country – Brazil.
Last year, X was banned by the Brazilian Supreme Court for 40 days because of a law that Elon Musk refused to comply with: any international company operating here must have a legal representative in the country. When X felt the impact of losing one of the largest and most active user bases worldwide, Musk surrendered.
In addition to big tech moguls, Donald Trump also has his eyes on us. In the final days of 2024, he filed a request to the Supreme Court to pause a law that would ban TikTok in the US. Brazil once again emerged, this time to ground the president-elect’s claim. Echoing Zuckerberg and Musk, Trump adopted the false censorship narrative spread by Brazilian far-right politicians linked to former president Jair Bolsonaro to distort the reasons that led to the temporary ban of X.
“Another major Western democracy – Brazil – shut down another entire social-media platform, X (formerly known as Twitter), for more than a month, apparently based on that government’s desire to suppress disfavored political speech,” says the petition issued in December 2024.
Meanwhile, last November, Brazil’s first lady was involved in an unusual altercation during the G-20 Summit in Rio de Janeiro. During a panel about disinformation, Rosângela ‘Janja’ da Silva was defending tougher social media regulation when she heard a loud noise in the background. “I think it’s Elon Musk,” she said. “I’m not afraid of you…fuck you, Elon Musk.”
To which the X owner replied on his own social media platform: “They are going to lose the next election.” The social media feud shows once again how much they care about Brazil.
Musk
Over the past few years, a series of crises have taken place here, a country where 84% of the population (212 million people) use the internet and where, according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, 74% get news online.
Like the US, Brazil has seen a political group make use of disinformation as a tool to gain power and attack enemies, the press, and other institutions. Led by former president Jair Bolsonaro, several well-mapped disinformation campaigns managed to erode popular support for the electoral system, and sow doubts about the possibility of fraud in the 2022 elections.
The former president and his followers used the cry of “fake news” to attack the Supreme Court and the Electoral Court, and to instigate an insurrection that tried to overthrow the newly elected government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The similarities between the Capitol invasion of January 6, 2021 in the US, and the invasion of government buildings in Brasilia on January 8, 2023, are so striking that one could say both leaders followed the same playbook to subvert a legitimate election.
Fighting back
But, after the coup attempt failed, Brazil took a different route altogether. While in the US, the judicial system moved slowly, Brazil’s Federal Police built quite a strong case against Bolsonaro, with thousands of messages, documents, and testimonies informing an indictment against the former president for his role in an attempted coup d’état.
Even before that, in 2023, Bolsonaro had been banned from running for office again. In February, this year, his passport was seized. He cannot flee the country. Bolsonaro has adopted a narrative in which he is the victim of an “authoritarian” Supreme Court that wants to censor his freedom of speech.
Meanwhile, Brazilian journalists have learnt a lot about how digital populists are using media manipulation to destroy democracy. We’ve adopted a variety of strategies to deal with disinformation campaigns. We know how to quickly identify a fake news campaign online and its culprits, as well as how to reduce the use of the mainstream media to spread them.
We have learned to combine data journalism with shoe-leather reporting to identify how these misinformation networks are formed, coordinated, and funded – often with public money. We have adopted concepts from academia and allied ourselves with some of the key experts in the field of disinformation.
We have created and shared methodologies to establish what is a simple organic misinformation wave and what is a systematic, structured, disinformation campaign. We developed linguistic models, monitoring stations, and AI-powered tools to help out.
We’ve come a long way.
Other institutions have also tried to fight back. Once again moving in a different direction than the US, our Congress responded to the January 8 invasion by trying to regulate Big Tech to improve safeguards for users and establish the corporations’ responsibility for criminal content spread by their algorithms.
The move was seen as crucial to these platforms’ agendas because Brazil is one of their largest markets. So the legislation was stonewalled by commercial interests. Google went as far as to use its search homepage, used by more than 90% of internet users in Brazil, to say that a draft bill would “make the internet worse.”
That’s when Elon Musk entered the stage with the confrontation against the Brazilian Supreme Court.
Doubling down on an already explosive political situation, earlier in 2024 he decided to confront the Supreme Court and accuse its most prominent justice, Alexandre de Moraes, of “censoring” X after he refused to suspend accounts that were spreading disinformation and threats against authorities. Claiming his “absolutist” defense of freedom of speech, Musk joined the Brazilian alt-right in calling Moraes “a dictator.”
The beef escalated with the closure of X’s offices in Brazil, which was followed by the suspension of the platform in the entire country for over a month.
But just like the Supreme Court, the federal government has not backed down on its quest to confront Big Tech. In November 2024, Lula’s administration led the G-20 meeting and managed to insert the need for social media and AI regulation in the final draft signed by 80-plus countries.
While it’s unlikely that Big Tech regulation will advance in Trump’s US, Brazil, the hemisphere’s second-largest democracy, has a civil society and a free press that has learned the urgency of establishing rules in the digital far west.
Unfortunately, we also know that it won’t be easy, and that tech oligarchs such as Musk will continue to pay special attention to Brazil. They know that what happens here could influence the entire region – and maybe the world.
This is a battle for the future of information integrity, journalism and democracy. If humanity is to overcome the unprecedented threat of weaponize disinformation and digital populism, Brazil is an essential fort to be held. That is why my prediction for journalism in 2025 – or maybe it’s wishful thinking – is that all eyes of the global media should be focused on what happens in Brazil.
Natalia Viana is the co-founder and executive director of Agência Pública, Brazil’s first nonprofit investigative journalism outlet. She leads long-term investigations and multimedia projects about human rights violations and the abuse of power. Viana is the author or co-author of six books about political violence and social issues in Latin America. She chairs the Brazilian Association of Digital Journalism and is a board member of the Gabo Foundation and the Center for Media Integrity, launched by the Organization of the American States.
This is an edited version of an article first published by the Nieman Lab. Read the original article here: https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/12/all-eyes-are-on-brazil/
This article appeared originally in Open Democracy – https://www.opendemocracy.net/
