Responses to Disinformation by the Leading Candidates in the 2022 Brazilian Election

The final IAMCR 2024 session for today is in disinformation and polarisation, and starts with Ivan Paganotti’s presentation on institutional communication by the leading candidates’ campaign Websites in the 2022 Brazilian election. In particular, he is interested in whether and how they tried to respond to electoral disinformation, and whether they had policies to curtail such disinformation once in office.

Data collection focussed especially on the period between the first and second rounds of the election, and examined any attempts at fact-checking electoral disinformation as well as responses to the federal administration’s social media guidelines.

The Lula and PT campaign episodically attempted to contest every new piece of what it considered to be false information, and also structurally debated the overall impact of disinformation on the political process. But its own efforts to promote ‘fact-checks’ of false information largely focussed on amplifying the responses from partisan trade unions and other organisations that were close to its own political interests.

The Bolsonaro and PL campaign avoided any discussion of disinformation; the term did not appear on the PL Website, and Bolsonaro himself did not have a Website of his own (only social media accounts). Bolsonaro only generally complained about being the victim of various ‘lies’ by his opponents, deflecting criticism directed at him and questioning the very existence of ‘fake news’ as a meaningful category.

Neither of these two strategies are especially productive; neither make a meaningful contribution to the fight against mis- and disinformation. They also do not align with the federal guidelines against disinformation published by the previous Rousseff and Bolsonaro administrations.