Brazil, Social Media, and the Fight for Democracies
The first week in January 2023 saw a worrying rise in anti-democratic rhetoric across the Brazilian social mediasphere. Calls for “Liberty Caravans” reached well beyond the major cities of São PauloSão, Rio de Janeiro, or Brasília to users across the country. According to the Washington Post, there were plans to carry people from at least six different states in Brazil. For what purpose? Organizers were rallying people to protest the recent election, where right-winger Bolsonaro lost to Lula of the left-wing Workers’ Party. With populism breeding antidemocratic sentiments, Bolsonaro supporters took a page from the Trump playbook and stormed the nation’s capital of Brasilia–ransacking government buildings, setting fires, and engaging in a range of violent and disruptive behavior.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, tried to remove content that spread election disinformation and supported the attack on Brazil’s democracy. But while there were attempts, some experts say far too many posts went unnoticed by content moderators. Social media analysts had been considering Brazil a hotspot since the January 6 insurrection in Washington D.C. Tik Tok was prevalent as well, with trends of “rigged ballots” showing in the top searches. And organizers are becoming more tactical; coded language was used to avoid being noticed by platform moderators and law enforcement authorities. Twitter has received significant focus in the aftermath both because of the use of the site by organizers of the riot and because of its failures to effectively moderate their activity. Since the takeover by Elon Musk, many content moderators and other contractors for the company have been fired, including most of the staff in Brazil. Musk has also been vocal about his desire to eliminate what he sees as left-wing bias from the platform’s approach to content regulation and has stoked conspiracies that Twitter policies tilted both the 2022 Brazilian election and 2020 U.S. election against Bolsonaro and Trump, respectively.
The dilemmas of free speech vs hate speech, incitement vs passion, and average social media users vs influencers and political leaders continue to pose thorny problems for both the private and public regulation of these platforms. The reach of social media allows for all manner of new political configuration and individuals to gain, even if only temporarily, influence across wide distances. It is still unclear how well the world’s democracies will deal with the challenges it represents.
