And the next speaker at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is the great Bruna Paroni, whose focus is on the São Paulo mayoral elections in 2024. These were the first elections after the divisive 2022 federal election and 2023 coup attempt led by disgraced former president Jair Bolsonaro, and therefore also served as a kind of barometer for the political mood in the country.
Bruna’s interest here is in how this intersects with Meta’s stated policy to reduce the amount of political content made visible in its users’ Facebook, and later also Instagram, feeds; the São Paulo election occurred during the period of the deepest reduction in political content in such feeds. To what extent were mayoral candidates able to break through this filter, and how was visibility allocated across them, then?
This study engaged in a manual content analysis of the ten most viewed Instagram posts across the five key candidates, then; these are selected from a total dataset of some 7,500 posts, some 90% of which were reels. One candidate here worked across three accounts, because the Electoral Court twice suspended his account – though in reality this was done by geoblocking the account in Brazil, rather than by forcing Meta to suspend it altogether.
Such drama seemed to result in much greater visibility for the posts by this candidate; and here, likes seem to lead to more views, and views to more likes. Content dimensions themselves did not seem to predict such visibility, then; rather, candidate identity seems to be the main factor here. Even Meta’s visibility reduction policy does not seem to stop this – and the account blocking episode suggests that there is an enforcement gap here for official sanctions against candidates.
