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A subsidiary of Facebook and a WhatsApp encrypted chat service has banned more than 100,000 accounts before the next federal election in Brazil, where left-wing Labor Party candidate Fernando Haddad will face right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro. announced Friday Bloomberg.
Facebook has recently been relentlessly boasting about its "War Room", an office located in its headquarters in Menlo Park, California, where employees track online organized misinformation attempts (or at least give away impression to do so). WhatsApp is a popular chat application that has a large user base abroad, but its encrypted nature makes Facebook's monitoring very difficult by design. As the Guardian noted, the Brazilian press is buzzing with rumors that Bolsonaro's business supporters have illegally agreed with the plot plotter to bomb WhatsApp users with "hundreds of millions" of spam messages. propaganda before October. 28 elections in the second round:
But according to allegations contained in a front page article of the Folha de São Paulo, one of the leading Brazilian newspapers, Bolsonaro allegedly received illegal aid from a group of Brazilian entrepreneurs who were funding a campaign to bomb WhatsApp users with false information about Haddad … In some cases, overseas numbers were used to bypass the platform's spam controls.
"This practice is illegal because it is an undeclared campaign donation by companies, something that is prohibited by the electoral legislation," the paper said.
"My opponent seeks to profit from electoral crimes", Haddad tweeted.
"We are facing here an attempt at electoral fraud," he added. claiming have information suggesting that 156 entrepreneurs were involved in the campaign.
Haddad asks for an investigation on WhatsApp's anti-spam campaign. According to Bloomberg, other political parties demand that Bolsonaro be "declared ineligible" and a police investigation was opened on this subject:
… The country's highest electoral court reacted Friday night by declaring that it would open an official investigation against Bolsonaro. Several political parties, including the Haddad Workers Party, jointly demand that Bolsonaro be declared ineligible for 8 years for economic abuse and misuse of digital communications.
The Brazilian Federal Police has also opened an investigation into the allegations of spam campaigns on WhatsApp related to the elections.
However, since Bolsonaro generally expects a landslide victory in the second round and that it pleads in favor of legalization of mass arrests and lethal lethal force by the police and the Appointing generals to key positions in his administration, it may be too late for a WhatsApp propaganda scandal to stop him.
WhatsApp told Bloomberg that they had identified and eliminated the 100,000 fraudulent accounts using "state-of-the-art technology to detect spam identifying accounts with abnormal behavior, so that they can not be used to disseminate spam or misinformation "and that they bring legal action against the companies involved. Still, the New York Times wrote on Friday that the estimated 120 million Brazilian WhatsApp users were inundated with spam for months, ranging from fake news on the vote to thousands of videos and images broadcasting lies and propaganda.
While Facebook saw in the Brazilian elections an opportunity to prove that it was taking up the challenge of fighting the use of its platform to overthrow the democratic process, the Times wrote that many Brazilians are simply seeing his answer as part of a plot to manipulate the news cycle:
This does not help many Brazilians to see the work of fact checkers as part of a damaging effort by big companies like Facebook to protect Brazilians from the truth.
"When we demold, most people simply do not trust the demystification," said Leonardo Cazes, editor of the "Fato or Fake" project for literacy in the Brazilian newspaper O Globo.
"People have entered this election with a sense of hyperpolarization," said Roberta Braga, associate director of the Adrienne Latin America Center Adrienne Arsht of the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank on foreign policy. "There is a lot of mistrust of politics and politicians and political institutions in general."
WhatsApp has also considered changing the way it operates in Brazil, including imposing stricter limits on the number of messages that can be transferred, the Times wrote. It should be noted that the alleged commercial conspiracy would have more spam, but it seems that their game book was simply to continue hammering WhatsApp with messages "similar to those already in circulation," the newspaper added.
WhatsApp has been used by extremist groups to fan violence and lynchings in India, and Myanmat's army has used Facebook as a tool to help genocide against Muslims. The continuing turmoil in Brazil shows that, despite management's efforts to respond, Facebook and its properties are increasingly using a political and electoral weapon at such a rate that it lacks the capacity or the courage to control.
WhatsApp is especially popular throughout Brazil as it is free, while local service providers usually offer premium rates for SMS capability. As the Washington Post noted, the invitation group function of the online chat application was used for organizational purposes by all, from "disgruntled Uber pilots, feminists to uncompromising conservatives" to union activists. . Similarly, WhatsApp and other social media services have allowed the propaganda networks to contribute to the chaos of an already troubling election season, potentially helping to pave the way for a candidate who promises to reinstate the country. order by autocratic means.
"The country is a pressure cooker," Francisco Bosco, author of the work on social media and politics in Brazil, told La Poste. "Social networks increase the pressure and allow a pragmatic organization. Conflicts and tensions occur every day, often in simple and reduced terms, which contribute to the polarization of the environment and the creation of scapegoats. "
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