A truism for our times: a story doesn’t
need to be factual to go viral. In June
2020, not long into the Covid- 19 pandemic,
an Instagram user shared a video
of a mustachioed man wearing floral
shorts and a cropped tank top, pouring
himself some beer at a crowded bar in
Santos, a coastal city in southeastern
Brazil. According to the caption, the
man was Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus,
the director- general of the World
Health Organization. He had apparently
decided to break the quarantine
by ditching his shoes and dancing to a
forró song called “Já que me ensinou a
beber” (Since You Taught Me to Drink).
Of course, it wasn’t the director of
the WHO in the video, which was actually
recorded before the start of the
pandemic. Nonetheless it circulated
as evidence of the hypocrisy of international
health authorities, and news
of it was translated into several languages.
Last August I saw an updated
version of the video: this time, Ghebreyesus
had been “caught enjoying
his vacation in Brazil and spreading
monkeypox.” So much homophobia and
moral outrage in such a short phrase.
Brazilians, like many others around
the world, have been exposed to a
deluge of fake news and social media
hoaxes over the past few years. Again
and again we have been pushed toward
radicalization, tribalism, and conspiracy.
In this light, the results of the presidential
election held in October are not
surprising: the center- left candidate,
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as
Lula, did prevail, but it was an alarmingly
tight race against the far- right
incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, who led a
catastrophically irresponsible administration.
The race went to a runoff, which
Lula won with 50.9 percent of the vote.
Despite refusing to implement measures
scientifically proven to mitigate
the spread of the virus, leading to over
695,000 Covid deaths in the past three
years, Bolso naro still enjoys enormous
support in much of the country.
Indeed, on January 8 thousands of
his supporters marched to the federal
government buildings in Brasília. They
proceeded—in an echo of the January
6, 2021, attempted coup at the US Capitol,
and with the same baseless claims
of election fraud—to invade and ransack
the National Congress building,
the Supreme Federal Court, and the
presidential palace. (After an insufficient
initial reaction, the police managed
to reclaim the three buildings.)
In the October election the far
right tightened its grip on both
houses of Congress. Bolsonaro’s Liberal
Party won ninety- nine seats in
the 513- member lower house—an increase
of twenty- two—and a coalition
of right- leaning parties now controls
half the chamber. In the Senate, the
Liberal Party won eight of the twentyseven
seats in dispute. Four of the new
senators, who will be in office for the
next eight years, are Bolsonaro’s former
ministers; Hamilton Mourão, his
former vice- president and a retired
army general, also won a seat. Bolsonaro’s
close allies and former high officials
have also been elected governors
of major states such as São Paulo and
Rio de Janeiro. In total he helped to
elect fourteen governors of Brazil’s
twenty- seven federative units.
These are not ordinary conservatives.
They are extremist politicians
who seem to celebrate the period of
brutal military dictatorship, when, beginning
in 1964, the military dissolved
Congress, suspended constitutional
rights, and imposed extensive censorship;
democracy was not restored until
1985. They claim that the great mistake
of the military regime was “to torture
but not kill,” as Bolsonaro himself declared
in 2016.
Many of these right- wing figures
are not ashamed to call for a new military
intervention in the government.
They follow a leader who advocated for
the death penalty and sought impunity
for police officers who murder alleged
lawbreakers. And they still panic, or at
least perform panic, over the threat of
Communists, who will supposedly confiscate
their property, turn their children
into homosexuals and drug addicts,
and convince all women to stop shaving
their armpits. “They want a single bathroom
for boys and girls,” a conservative
woman in her seventies told me in December
when I visited a pro- Bolsonaro
campsite in São Paulo. She was one of
the thousands of far- right extremists
who spent two months after the vote
lodged in front of military barracks
around the country demanding a coup.
Over the past decade the country’s
center- right has steadily collapsed. Bolsonaro’s
radical vision has ascended.
What remained of other centrist democratic
parties gathered around Lula,
but even that broad front was nearly
defeated. Lula’s return to the presidency
is a profound relief. All the same,
the election results were shocking.
Brazil is the largest country in Latin
America, with more than 215 million
people and the highest GDP in the
region. Historically, it has been conservative
and majority- Catholic, with
a stratified and hierarchical society.
Brazil was the last nation in the Americas
to abolish slavery, in 1888. Today
60 percent of the population is against
the legalization of abortion.
The Portuguese arrived in 1500 and
ruled until 1822, when Emperor Pedro
I established a Brazilian monarchy. In
1889 the military worked with large
landholders to create a republican government.
The presidents of the First
Republic were backed by the wealthy
coffee and dairy oligarchs in fecund
states like São Paulo and Minas Gerais,
and ruled until 1930, when Brazilians
revolted after the assassination of
João Pessoa, a vice- presidential candidate
in that year’s election. The military
swiftly staged a coup and handed
power to the populist dictator Getúlio
Vargas, who governed until 1945, when
he was deposed in another military
coup.
Vargas returned in 1951 but in 1954
was again threatened by the military
(and discredited after one of his
bodyguards attempted to assassinate
a political opponent); then he shot
himself. The next elected president,
Juscelino Kubitschek, built a new capital,
Brasília, and ruled until 1961, when
the conservative Jânio Qua dros was
elected under an anticorruption banner.
But Quadros resigned after seven
months in office. He was succeeded
by the left- wing reformist João Goulart,
a member of the Brazilian Labor
Party who had served as vice- president
under both Kubitschek and Quadros.
Goulart was deposed in the 1964
coup. The military dictatorship, backed
by the United States, seized power,
claiming it would save the country
from the (vastly overblown) threat of
communism. In the two dark decades
that followed, five generals took turns
as president. The regime tortured approximately
20,000 people and killed or
“disappeared” more than four hundred.
The government at last returned to
civilian control in 1985, after a complex
redemocratization process during
which the old military regime’s main
opposition groups consolidated into
political parties. They have been succeeding
one another in the presidency
ever since. In her recent book O ovo da
serpente (The Serpent’s Egg, 2022), the
Brazilian journalist Consuelo Dieguez
offers an excellent synthesis of our
recent history, one deeply informed
by her interview with the Brazilian
economist Eduardo Giannetti. In the
late 1980s the first of these opposition
groups, the center- right PMDB
(Partido do Movimento Democrático
Brasileiro), solidified Brazil’s young
democracy by organizing and putting
into place a new constitution. Ulysses
Guimarães and José Sarney were the
PMDB’s main leaders.
The second group, the more centrist
PSDB (Partido da Social Democracia
Brasileira), formed in 1988, managed
to stabilize the economy and end inflation.
One of its leaders was the sociologist
Fernando Henrique Cardoso,
who governed the country from 1995
to 2002. The last group, the centerleft
PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores,
or Workers’ Party), led by Lula from
2003 to 2010 and then by Dilma
Rousseff from 2011 to 2016, pursued
macroeconomic balance and bolder
income- distribution policies. Millions
of Brazilians were lifted from poverty.
Lula’s government implemented a pioneering
program of monthly cash
allowances to the poor called Bolsa
Família, which also contributed to
nutrition, and health care.
This steady progress was marred by
corruption scandals and the economic
crisis in the 2010s. Brazilians began to
feel dissatisfied. In 2013 an estimated
one million people took to the streets,
demanding everything from free public
transportation to the end of endemic
corruption. Multiple groups rose up, on
the left and the right. In 2016 Rousseff
was impeached and removed from office
by a largely conservative legislature
on vague charges of manipulating
the federal budget to conceal evidence
of economic shortcomings. It was, in
fact, a congressional coup to oust a
very unpopular president.
Lula was considered a front- runner
in the 2018 presidential election, but
he was deemed ineligible to participate
after he was arrested on moneylaundering
and corruption charges. He
spent 580 days in prison. In 2021 the
Supreme Federal Court nullified the
convictions, declaring that the trial
was faulty and the judge biased. (Sergio
Moro, the crusading young judge
who presided over Lula’s trial, later
served as Bolsonaro’s minister of justice
and public security.)
Bolsonaro, a sixty- three- year- old
retired army captain, emerged from
the depths of Congress, where he had
served in relative obscurity for twentyseven
years, to speak to those nostalgic
for the military era. Born in the countryside
of São Paulo, he served briefly
in the army’s parachute brigade. He
was considered a “bad military man”
by the former president General Ernesto
Geisel. After being imprisoned
for insubordination, he left the armed
forces and launched a political career
in Rio de Janeiro.
Bolsonaro is a self- declared homophobe.
He once told a congresswoman
that he would never rape her because
she didn’t “deserve it.” After his decades
in Congress he ran for president
with a promise to drag the country
back into the past if elected. In 2018—
while Lula was still imprisoned—Bolsonaro
defeated Fernando Haddad of
the PT with 55.1 percent of the vote.
How did Bolsonaro stage this ascendance?
And how has the Brazilian
center- right been so totally overrun?
In The Chaos Machine: The Inside
Story of How Social Media Rewired
Our Minds and Our World (2022), the
New York Times reporter Max Fisher
begins to answer that question. In a
chapter on the political situation in
Brazil over the past few years, Fisher
correctly notes that the political establishment
had rejected Bolsonaro
for decades because of his fanatical
positions, misogyny, and hate speech.
“But that attention- grabbing behavior
performed well online,” Fisher notes,
with social media channels such as
WhatsApp, Telegram, and particularly
YouTube responsible for the upsurge
in Bolsonaro’s popularity. I especially
appreciated a comment from Brian
Winter, the editor of Americas Quarterly,
who visited Bolsonaro’s office
before the 2018 election. All eight staffers
were “doing social media the entire
time I was there,” he said. “There
was no legislative work being done.”
Fisher explains how social media
platforms are designed to provide
users with more and more divisive
content, driving them into “selfreinforcing
echo chambers of extremism”
in order to retain their attention
and increase engagement time. A 2019
internal Facebook report on hate and
misinformation found “compelling evidence
that our core product mechanics,
such as virality, recommendations,
and optimizing for engagement, are a
significant part of why these types of
speech flourish on the platform.” Fisher’s
book is not specific to Brazil, but
the populous, diverse country offers
a laboratory for his thesis.
Fisher draws on his field research to
argue that YouTube not only created
an online fringe community but also
radicalized Brazil’s entire conservative
movement, displacing traditional rightwing
politics almost completely. The
results of the October election corroborate
this. The PSDB, which once was
one of the strongest political forces
in the country, is now virtually dead.
I have followed many right- wing
groups on social media for The New
York Times and piauí, a monthly Brazilian
magazine, trying to make sense of
these changes. I’ve been submerged in
racist, misogynist, anti- Semitic, and violent
discussions. (“Nobody in the past
hundred years has done more for peace
than Adolf Hitler,” I read in a Brazilian
chat group with over 4,500 members.)
I’ve heard endless refutations of science
and epidemiology. Social media
has let opinions that long lurked in the
ugly political fringes bask in the open.
In this historically violent and unequal
country we feel that there is a
void in the democratic field, that political
rationality has been disappearing
before our eyes. This void can be
explained by the conversion of a large
group of voters to autocratic extremisms
with conspiratorial outlooks.
“I think even fake news is valid,
with all due respect,” Bolsonaro
said in a radio interview in 2018,
months before that year’s election.
Three years later, as president of the
country, he declared: “Fake news is
part of our lives.” And: “The Internet
is a success.” He had just been granted
a special communication award from
his own Ministry of Communications
(which kind of sums up our situation).
From the beginning of his presidency
Bolsonaro tried to undermine the credibility
of Brazil’s media and the Supreme
Federal Court, institutions necessary
for rational balance in our democracy
and capable of constraining his totalitarian
impulses. He also worked hard
to disparage Brazil’s electronic voting
machines—the same ones on which he
was elected. In July 2022, for example,
he called dozens of foreign diplomats
to the presidential palace to discredit
the country’s voting system, lecturing
from a baseless and bizarre PowerPoint
presentation. After he finished there
was an embarrassing silence from the
audience, followed by timid applause
from the president’s cabinet members.
Apparently the main goal of Bolsonaro’s
right is to promote a flood of
disinformation to keep people disoriented
and angry, spreading distrust. A
(provisional) list of institutions vilified
on Brazilian Telegram by the far right
includes the United Nations, UNESCO,
the WHO, the Supreme Federal Court,
Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, the
Health Regulatory Agency, NASA, the
mainstream media, fact- checking organizations,
Pope Francis, heliocentrism,
stars, dinosaurs (they never
existed), pollsters, and padded bras.
On Telegram, a messaging service
that supports groups of up to 200,000
members and channels with an unlimited
number of subscribers, a kind of
moral and epistemological free- forall
has been reigning for years. You-
Tube videos are often among the
most shared posts on the platform.
According to Digital Democracy Room,
a project run by the Getulio Vargas
Foundation, a Brazilian think tank and
higher education institution, YouTube
videos accounted for eight of the top
ten major links shared on Telegram in
August. These are often videos from
right- wing influencers who spread
misinformation about their political
enemies to keep their base inflamed.
It took me a while to absorb the terminology
used by members of these
communities. People who trust vaccines
are called aceitacionistas (a neologism
to describe people who accept things
without questioning). Those of us who
received Covid shots are “hybrids” who
have been “zombified.” LGBTQ people
are “people with inverted poles.” I have
browsed through a Telegram dating
group exclusive to single heterosexuals
“with a 100 percent uncorrupted DNA,”
which means those who have gotten no
Covid vaccinations and never submitted
to PCR tests. The main goal is to
“date, marry, and procreate.”
Despite exhaustive efforts from factchecking
agencies and the WHO, these
groups continue spreading old falsehoods
claiming that Covid vaccines
contain microchips, nanoparticles,
graphene oxide, quantum dots, and
parasites activated by electromagnetic
impulses. According to them, vaccines
can carry HIV (the virus that causes
AIDS), make coins stick to our arms,
and give us the ability to connect to
Wi- Fi networks or pair with Bluetooth
devices. From these groups I have also
learned of “vaccine shedding,” which
occurs when a vaccinated individual
stands near someone “with pure
DNA,” sometimes fatally contaminating
them. Members still apparently believe
in hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin
as Covid treatments, while denying effective
mitigations like masking and
social distancing.
Their rhetoric is so absurd that,
after many turns of the screw, it almost
becomes a work of art. My favorite
channel is the completely insane
“Desmagnetizado” (Demagnetized),
which has over 11,000 subscribers and
headlines such as “Zombified Hybrids
Interacting with 5G” and “Explosive
Zombified People.” The following is a
description of a video that I did not
watch: “A male synthetic organism was
walking down the street when it came
across an evil 5G entity. The biological
entity had taken the third dose of
the vaccine and its graphene nano- bot
system was revved up.”
Here is an example of a fake headline
that caused moral outrage on
a Brazilian Telegram channel: “UNICEF
Suggests That Pornography May Be
Good for Children.” On a YouTube
channel, a similar assertion aroused
the wrath of its members: “They want
to pass a pro- incest law.” (“They” are
obviously the Satan- worshiping, pedophilic
left.) Made- up stories like these
are designed to set off tribal defense
“us versus them.”
There are many who share fake news
unwittingly, and there are those who
exploit this vulnerability. Rodrigo
Nunes, a philosophy professor at the
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio
de Janeiro, explains that the new
Brazilian far right can be seen as an
entrepreneurial movement, with politicians
carving out a niche market
for the high demand of frustrated citizens.
In his essay collection Do transe
à vertigem (From Trance to Vertigo,
2022), Nunes discusses the resentment
among the Brazilian petty bourgeoisie,
who feel aggrieved by a “cultural
elite” that masters intellectual codes,
a “social elite” that has connections,
and an “economic elite” that holds the
wealth. On the other hand, they also
feel the threat of losing their markers
of dominance: exclusive access to
services such as international travel
and paid domestic work. Meanwhile,
Nunes writes, sensing new market demands,
hundreds of “bankrupt businessmen,
decadent rock stars, failed
actors, journalists of dubious reputation,
sub- celebrity ‘activists,’ struggling
traders, mediocre life coaches,
police and military officers looking to
supplement their income” have found
an opportunity for a new career. They
began to identify themselves as conservative
and patriotic agitators, often
entering mainstream politics. Look at
Nikolas Ferreira, a twenty- six- year- old
evangelical TikTok star who received
nearly 1.5 million votes in his run for
a seat in Congress.
We are trapped in a vicious cycle:
moral outrage and threats to status produce
stronger group affiliations, which
are then exploited by politicians who
profit from this division and further
incentivize it. It can be a short climb
from here to autocracy. As noted in the
2022 Democracy Report published by
the V- Dem Institute, a research group
based in Sweden that tracks the state
of democracy around the world, “Once
political elites and their followers no
longer believe that political opponents
are legitimate and deserve equal respect,
democratic norms and rules can
be set aside to ‘save the nation.’”
The race between Lula and Bolsonaro
was, seen from this perspective,
a momentous crossroads: Brazil
could either keep sliding toward a
democratic rupture or reverse course.
The political scientist Oliver Stuenkel,
a professor at the School of International
Relations at the Getulio
Vargas Foundation and a columnist
for Americas Quarterly, argues that to
sink a democratic system an authoritarian
leader in most cases needs to
be reelected at least once. This is because,
first, the dismantling of institutions
usually takes time. Reducing
legislative and judicial independence
might require, for example, multiple
opportunities to nominate ideologically
aligned judges. Second, reelection
represents both a moral boost for
the authoritarian leader and a strong
letdown for the opposition and civil
society.
Bolsonaro’s own tactics mixed a violent
and morally righteous discourse
with a generous dash of militarism.
In 2019 around a third of his cabinet
was made up of retired or active- duty
military personnel, with many more in
crucial government positions. While in
power Bolsonaro helped to dismantle
environmental agencies, increasing the
rate of deforestation in the Amazon.
Each year he was in office, hundreds of
indigenous people were murdered. He
signed over a dozen decrees loosening
restrictions on civilian gun ownership;
as a result, the number of privately
owned weapons rose to 1.9 million in
2022, up from 695,000 in 2018.
Luckily, we’ll never know what he
had in mind for a second term, but his
next step at least was clear: to eliminate
the opposition from the judiciary.
He appointed two hard- right justices
to the Supreme Federal Court. Had
he won, he would have appointed
two more to fill this year’s vacancies.
(There are eleven members of the
court.) The Supreme Federal Court
and the Superior Electoral Court were
a strong check on Bolsonaro; in 2022,
for instance, they ordered social networks
to remove antidemocratic posts
spreading disinformation about the
electoral system. They also issued an
arrest warrant for a right- wing congressman
for inciting both a coup and
violence against the judges. (Bolsonaro
pardoned him the next day.)
Most importantly, the judiciary
has been conducting investigations
to identify the groups responsible for
funding and spreading misinformation
and propaganda in the country.
The evidence points to an orchestrated
scheme that fabricates and broadcasts
disinformation on social networks for
“ideological, party- political, and financial
gains.” This so- called cabinet of
hate is allegedly composed of Bolsonaro’s
closest allies, his special aides,
and members of his family. Carlos Bolsonaro,
one of the former president’s
sons and a Rio de Janeiro city councilman,
has been identified as a central
player in the scheme. The former president
himself is being investigated for
his “direct and relevant role” in spreading
disinformation. (They all deny the
accusations.)
Now the federal police are working
to identify the January 8 rioters and
their financial sponsors, and a Supreme
Federal Court judge approved a request
from prosecutors to include Bolso naro
in the investigation. Around 1,500 people
have been detained so far in relation
to January 8—two hundred during
the attacks on government buildings
and others at the pro- Bolsonaro camp
in Brasília—on charges of terrorism,
criminal association, attacks on the
democratic rule of law, coup d’état, persecution,
and inciting crime. There’s
nothing left of the campsite in São
Paulo that I visited in December.
Bolsonaro’s electoral defeat means
respite for Brazilians from his endless
promotion of conspiracy theories.
Lula’s victory was only possible
because democratic forces from
many points on the political spectrum
united to block the country’s
descent into the old depths of totalitarianism.
This means that Lula will
have to share power with a broadbased
coalition whose interests are
quite varied.
But it also means that there will be
no place anymore for antiscientific
discourse in the fight against Covid
and other illnesses, including polio and
tuberculosis; we desperately need to
restore the excellent vaccination coverage
for childhood diseases that we
had in the not- so- distant past. Lula
has promised to address the urgency
of food deprivation and hunger, which
affect 33 million Brazilians (an increase
of 57 percent from December 2020).
And with Marina Silva as minister of
the environment and climate change
and Sônia Guajajara in the newly created
Ministry of Indigenous People,
there is also great hope for the Amazon
rainforest. It is perhaps here that Lula’s
election matters most to the planet.
Still, we are at a fragile moment.
All the components that enabled
Bolsonaro’s rise are still in place. As
two Democratic members of the US
Congress, Tom Malinowski and Anna
Eshoo, wrote in a letter to the CEOs
of Google and YouTube, it would take
eliminating “the fundamental problem”
of algorithms that reinforce users’
existing biases—“especially those
rooted in anger, anxiety, and fear”—
to curb this toxic polarization.
Facebook, according to internal
documents quoted by Fisher, knew
by April 2021 that their algorithms
“were boosting dangerous misinformation,
that they could have stemmed
the problem dramatically with the flip
of a switch, and that they refused to
do so for fear of hurting traffic.” The
company’s researchers had found that
“serial reshares” were likelier to be
false, but the algorithm, measuring
them for potential virality, artificially
boosted their reach anyway. “Simply
turning off this boost,” the researchers
found, “would curb Covid- related
misinformation by up to 38 percent.”
This would be an important step to
amend political fracturing in Brazil
and elsewhere. After all, despite the
results of the last presidential election,
extremism on the Brazilian far
right has not been defeated.
The day after the election, my fouryear-
old daughter returned from
preschool telling me about a heated
bathroom scuffle. A little boy shouted
that President- elect Lula was a thief.
My daughter and her classmate yelled
back at him, “He is not! He is not!” A
commotion followed. Luckily, discussions
in the preschool bathroom are
not intensified by an exploitative algorithm,
and before long the children
were on speaking terms again.
Lula was inaugurated on the first
day of the year, but liberals should not
presume that almost half of the population
has returned to their senses
now that the sensible guy is back in
office. It is still up to Brazilians to set
their country on a more democratic,
less ludicrous course. .
—January 26, 2023
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
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