Disinformation in the Brazilian pre-election context: probing the content, spread and implications of fake news about Lula da Silva

Abstract

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 and mixed-methods approach that combined an online data collection of content, spread, propagators, and interactions' analyses, with in-depth analysis of the meaning of such fake news. The results show that the most successful fake news about Lula capitalized on prior hostility toward him, several originated or were spread by conservative right-wing politicians and mainstream journalists, and that the pro-Lula fake news circulated in smaller networks and had overall less global reach. Facebook and WhatsApp were the main dissemination platforms of these contents.

When debates break apart: Discursive polarization as multi-dimensional divergence emerging in and through communication

“…It is precisely these very active partisan users that are found to be responsible for the perceived dominance of misinformation and incivility (Dourado and Salgado 2021) and the polarization of social media networks (Kaiser et al 2022). Osmundsen et al (2020) showed that the (re-)distribution of disinformation is fueled by anti-outgroup-sentiment: "individuals who report hating their political opponents are the most likely to share political fake news" (p. 1).…”

Brazil’s Digital Politics and the Crisis of Democracy (2013-2018)

“…Fake news in the 2018 presidential elections was valuable for the Bolsonaro campaign in at least three ways: to gather political support from one side of the polarize audience by disseminating disinformation about the other side, to further mobilize political supporters to participate in polarized debates, and as an attention diverting tool strategy to recurrent political scandals involving Bolsonaro and his family. Under these disinformation strategies, the Workers Party campaign, and in particular Lula da Silva, was the main target of fake news in the 2018 electoral year, which was disseminated by digital and mainstream media [42].…”

“…There is often a tendency to classify processes as either intensive or extensive[41]. Although the process traced here would be generally classified as intensive because there is a "tightly connected sequences of events" intermediated by causal mechanisms ([42], p. 459), the process here presents a complex causality provided that the Operation Car Wash considerably amplified the magnitude of the mechanism over the outcome of the process and directly influenced the outcome.…”