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This research scrutinizes the content, spread, and implications of disinformation in Brazil’s 2018 pre-election period. It focuses specifically on the most widely shared fake news about Lula da Silva and links these with the preexisting polarization and political radicalization, ascertaining the role of context. The research relied on a case study...
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Citations
... Therefore, they can be considered as hoaxes and thus be assimilated to disinformation. Furthermore, previous research on political disinformation (Dourado & Salgado, 2021;Pedriza, 2021;Rosińska, 2021) has used the same strategy to construct the sample, a circumstance that lends validity and credibility to our methodological approach. ...
Electoral campaigns are one of the key moments of democracy. In recent times, the circulation of disinformation has increased during these periods. This phenomenon has serious consequences for democratic health since it can alter the behaviour and decisions of voters. This research aims to analyse the features of this phenomenon during the 2024 European Parliament elections in a comparative way. The applied methodology is based on quantitative content analysis. The sample ( N = 278) comprises false information verified by 52 European fact-checking agencies about the campaign for the European elections in 20 EU countries. The analysis model includes variables such as time-period, country, propagator platform, topic, and the type of disinformation. The results show that the life cycle of electoral disinformation goes beyond the closing of the polls assuming a permanent nature. In addition, national environments condition the profiles of this question, which is more intense in Southern and Eastern Europe. Furthermore, although multiple channels are involved, digital platforms with weak ties are predominant in disseminating hoaxes. Finally, migration and electoral integrity are the predominant topics. This favours the circulation of an issue central to the far-right agenda and aims to discredit elections and their mechanisms to undermine democracy. These findings establish the profiles of this problem and generate knowledge to design public policies that combat electoral false content more effectively.
... The spread of disinformation through different media channels is a complex phenomenon, largely studied in the context of elections (Dourado and Salgado 2021;Grinberg et al. 2019;Zimmermann and Kohring 2020). Social media, together with fake news and alternative news websites, have been reported as the most important channels through which citizens access disinformation (Allcott and Gentzkow 2017;Ng and Taeihagh 2021;Suau and Puertas-Graell 2023). ...
The phenomenon of disinformation has been extensively studied, with its roots traced to shifts in the media economy, declining trust, and rising political polarization and populism. Although there is a growing research on disinformation, the issues of its dissemination and reach remain contested. This study investigates the reach and dissemination channels of selected disinformation narratives in Serbia. Through a survey-based approach (N=800), the research examines seven such cases identified through fact-checking portals: alleged Russian aid superiority, alleged Ukrainian biolabs, purported Western cultural censorship, supposed Soros’s global influence, claimed Serbian-Sanskrit connections, alleged Western origins of COVID-19, and misrepresented UN policies on sexuality. The findings reveal a significant reach of these narratives, with four out of seven being recognized by over half of the respondents. Variations in exposure and belief across different narratives potentially stem from factors such as ideological alignment, plausibility, timing, and the presence of counter-narratives. A “market” of disinformation exists on TV, digital news services, and social media, while traditional press and radio play an almost negligible role in disseminating these narratives. This research adds to the growing body of work examining disinformation in illiberal contexts. It provides initial observations on how false information circulates in a media environment where political control is prevalent and media independence is under pressure, pointing to areas for future research in this complex field.
... Following popular protests of the early 2010s, the debates balanced between celebratory perceptions (Castells 2015;Cogburn & Espinoza-Vasquez 2011;Hodge 2009;Shirky 2011) of social media as a tool for change, as well as warnings about the persistence, if not the worsening of, authoritarianism enabled by the internet (Morozov 2009a) and promoting slacktivism (Gladwell 2010;Morozov 2009bMorozov , 2011. Current debates represent a "backlash" in perception, with increasing concerns over different forms of surveillance (Zuboff 2015(Zuboff , 2019, fake news (Morgan 2018), dis/misinformation (Armitage & Vaccari 2021;Dourado & Salgado 2021;Tully et al. 2022), socio-political polarisation (Cota et al. 2019;Dunaway 2021), echo chambers (Dubois & Blank 2018) and bolstering of far-right movements and accommodating forms of incivility and hate speech (Gondwe 2021). Despite these growing concerns, there are still significant considerations over what is regarded as digital democracy, particularly in Western contexts. ...
... Around the same time, in Brazil, social media also played a key role in the 2019 election of Jair Bolsonaro as leader of that country. Tools such as WhatsApp have been associated with disinformation during electoral campaigns (Dourado & Salgado 2021). ...
... Despite these differences between the Global North and South, beliefs in political misinformation can be pervasive regardless of regime type or development level (e.g., for a discussion in the context of the "developing democracy" of Brazil, see Dourado and Salgado, 2021;Pereira et al., 2022). ...
Mis- and disinformation pose substantial societal challenges, and have thus become the focus of a substantive field of research. However, the field of misinformation research has recently come under scrutiny on two fronts. First, a political response has emerged, claiming that misinformation research aims to censor conservative voices. Second, some scholars have questioned the utility of misinformation research altogether, arguing that misinformation is not sufficiently identifiable or widespread to warrant much concern or action. Here, we rebut these claims. We contend that the spread of misinformation—and in particular willful disinformation—is demonstrably harmful to public health, evidence-informed policymaking, and democratic processes. We also show that disinformation and outright lies can often be identified and differ from good-faith political contestation. We conclude by showing how misinformation and disinformation can be at least partially mitigated using a variety of empirically validated, rights-preserving methods that do not involve censorship.
... Scholars observed the important role of digital media in the culmination of these events. Digital media became a major conduit for anti-establishment news, and served to normalize Bolsonaro's populist discourse [71][72][73]. Communication campaigns mobilized citizens to engage in polarized debates, with platforms like Facebook and Twitter becoming the site of rancorous and even violent discourse. Despite these differences, Canada and Brazil share important commonalities. ...
Early optimism saw possibilities for social media to renew democratic discourse, marked by hopes for individuals from diverse backgrounds to find opportunities to learn from and interact with others different from themselves. This optimism quickly waned as social media seemed to breed ideological homophily marked by “filter bubbles” or “echo chambers.” A typical response to the sense of fragmentation has been to encourage exposure to more cross-partisan sources of information. But do outlets that reach across partisan lines in fact generate more civil discourse? And does the civility of discourse hosted by such outlets vary depending on the political context in which they operate? To answer these questions, we identified bubble reachers, users who distribute content that reaches other users with diverse political opinions in recent presidential elections in Brazil, where populism has deep roots in the political culture, and Canada, where the political culture is comparatively moderate. Given that background, this research studies unexplored properties of content shared by bubble reachers, specifically the quality of conversations and comments it generates. We examine how ideologically neutral bubble reachers differ from ideologically partisan accounts in the level of uncivil discourse they provoke, and explore how this varies in the context of the two countries considered. Our results suggest that while ideologically neutral bubble reachers support less uncivil discourse in Canada, the opposite relationship holds in Brazil. Even non-political content by ideologically neutral bubble reachers elicits a considerable amount of uncivil discourse in Brazil. This indicates that bubble reaching and incivility are moderated by the national political context. Our results complicate the simple hypothesis of a universal impact of neutral bubble reachers across contexts.
... Foreign corporate media kept international audiences largely oblivious to the illegitimacy of both Dilma's impeachment and Lula's imprisonment, as well as the "overwhelming" evidence of US involvement (Mier, 2023). Pro-Lula information circulated in much smaller networks and had less reach (Dourado & Salgado, 2021). ...
Sustainability researchers are writing much about levers for transformations towards sustainability but too little about the most powerful means available for obstructing and activating them: mass-reaching media systems. How media systems are structured and governed form a profoundly important meta-level layer of decision-making that ought to be central in the study of environmental politics and in environmental policymaking. A politics- and media-focused account of the rise of Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency of Brazil illustrates the essential role of media systems and the need for new principles, structures, and policies for their governance if the interlinked goals of democracy, equity, and environmental protection are to be achieved. The pervasive inattention to this in environmental research reinforces hegemonic forces and needs to be widely discussed, understood, and overcome to achieve much needed just transformations towards sustainability.
... Beyond this ambiguity, digital media are also sites of struggle over such constructed personas and realities. Scholars are tracking Bolsonaro's disinformation campaigns (Dourado and Salgado, 2021) and fact-checkers are exposing his false claims (Palau, 2021). Yet direct refutations of disinformation have been found to encourage further propagation as well as political fatigue and cynicism in citizens (Deibert, 2019, p. 32). ...
... The sentimental nature of digital users is a major determinant in causing the spread of fake news on social media platforms (Tsipursky et al., 2018) and leads toward the deterioration of truth globally and creates barriers for stakeholders to fake news adherents (Froehlich, 2019). New media technologies have heightened the dissemination of fake news all over the world regardless of the cultures, languages, traditions, races and so on (Inobemhe et al., 2020) and caused the spread of fake online stories and propaganda by different sects, parties and groups for selfish ends (Dourado and Salgado, 2021). However, effective psychological counseling plays a vital role to reduce the spread of misinformation on social media (Tsipursky et al., 2018). ...
... The rapid proliferation of fake information (Roozenbeek and Linden, 2019) was causing madness for digital content sharing without knowing the validity of the news sources (Ali et al., 2022). The pace of sharing misinformation on digital media was astonishingly fast (Tsipursky et al., 2018), and it became difficult to stop the ever-growing spread of fake news (Dourado and Salgado, 2021). During crises, enormous amounts of user-generated content were created (Brynielsson et al., 2014), and fast dissemination of online news (Sivek, 2018) disturbed the mental health of the people. ...
... Facebook algorithms and social bots also spread fake information (Johnson, 2018) to confuse people about different events of social interest. Web-based companies ignored the responsibility to crosscheck facts before publishing content on their websites (Inobemhe et al., 2020); consequently, online deceptive content grew due to the excessive usage of new media technologies (Dourado and Salgado, 2021). Automated factchecking lacked adequate coding (Bakir and McStay, 2018), which made it confusing to identify online information with an accurate context (Dourado and Salgado, 2021). ...
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the determinants causing fake information proliferation on social media platforms and the challenges to control the diffusion of fake news phenomena.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors applied the systematic review methodology to conduct a synthetic analysis of 37 articles published in peer-reviewed journals retrieved from 13 scholarly databases.
Findings
The findings of the study displayed that dissatisfaction, behavior modifications, trending practices to viral fake stories, natural inclination toward negativity and political purposes were the key determinants that led individuals to believe in fake news shared on digital media. The study also identified challenges being faced by people to control the spread of fake news on social networking websites. Key challenges included individual autonomy, the fast-paced social media ecosystem, fake accounts on social media, cutting-edge technologies, disparities and lack of media literacy.
Originality/value
The study has theoretical contributions through valuable addition to the body of existing literature and practical implications for policymakers to construct such policies that might prove successful antidote to stop the fake news cancer spreading everywhere via digital media. The study has also offered a framework to stop the diffusion of fake news.
... Brazil is chosen as the focus due to its status as one of the world's largest democracies and a significant hub for disinformation Rodríguez-Pérez & García-Vargas, 2021). The impact of disinformation in the 2018 Brazilian presidential election (Dourado & Salgado, 2021;Santini et al., 2021) further highlights the importance of studying fact-checkers' strategies in countering falsehoods in 2022. This ballot was also noteworthy because it was seen as a pivotal juncture for the future of far-right populism in Brazil, with potential international ramifications. ...
... The Brazilian far-right employed a "mediated strategy that heightens political polarization and social-media culture wars" (Smith, 2020: p. 77). Numerous falsehoods circulating during the 2018 pre-election period targeting Lula (center-left) -Bolsonaro's (far-right wing) main adversarywere spread primarily on Facebook and WhatsApp by conservative right-wing politicians and journalists working for the mainstream media (Dourado and Salgado, 2021). Despite a few existing analyses on Brazil's disinformation environment, Staender and Humprecht (2023) show in their compilation of disinformation studies that most research has focused on the US or specific types and sources of health (COVID) disinformation. ...
This study observes content-related indicators of the editorial decisions made by fact-checkers during the 2022 Brazilian runoff election. Specifically, it aims to investigate fact-checkers' outputs regarding verification genres, scrutinized actors, types of verified falsehoods, and inspected platforms. The focus on Brazil stems from its reputation as a disinformation hub, owing to social polarization, populist communication, high social media use, low media trust, and intense WhatsApp penetration. Consequently, fact-checking agencies have proliferated within Brazil's media landscape. To provide some hints about the fact-checkers' editorial choices, we conducted a quantitative content analysis of verification articles (n = 349) published during the second round of the presidential election by four leading fact-checking organizations: Lupa and Aos Fatos (independents), Estadão Verifica (press), and AFP Checamos (global news agency). The results reveal a prioritization of combating online falsehoods (82.2%) spread by anonymous sources, as opposed to verifying public figures' statements (5.5%), a trend already observed in other media systems. Although Meta's social networks and Twitter are primarily monitored, other platforms such as TikTok, Kwai, and Telegram are increasingly gaining fact-checkers' attention. Fact-checkers predominantly scrutinized anonymous disinformation agents. Moreover, they primarily debunked falsehoods targeting the opposition, legacy media, social networking companies, and the Supreme Electoral Court. Despite the anonymity, 77.4% of the verified falsehoods were found to be beneficial to Bolsonaro, while 12% were advantageous to Lula da Silva.
Following democracy's global advance in the late 20th century, recent patterns of democratic erosion or 'backsliding' have generated extensive scholarly debate. Backsliding towards autocracy is often the work of elected leaders operating within democratic institutions, challenging conventional thinking about the logic of democratic consolidation, the enforcement of institutional checks and balances, and the development and reproduction of democratic norms. This volume tackles these challenges head-on, drawing theoretical insights from classic literature on democratic transitions and consolidation to help explain contemporary challenges to democracy. It offers a comparative perspective on the dynamics of democratic backsliding, the changing character of authoritarian threats, and the sources of democratic resiliency around the world. It also integrates the institutional, civil society, and international dimensions of contemporary challenges to democracy, while providing coverage of Western and Eastern Europe, South and Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the United States.
