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Rio de Janeiro (AFP) – Brazil, like other countries, faces a highly electronic election. WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter are the weapons of choice to influence the country's 147 million voters – and social media abuses have been rampant.
Facebook and its WhatsApp messaging service – very popular in the Latin American nation – have been put in the spotlight for being used for misinformation traffic.
The far-right leader in the second round, Jair Bolsonaro, largely avoided the established media in Brazil, preferring to seduce voters online in a manner reminiscent of US President Donald Trump.
Bolsonaro's rival, the left-wing candidate, Fernando Haddad, is unleashed against "false information" and "lies" against him, as well as his labor party, while Bolsonaro's support is developed to become an unassailable track.
Polls suggest that Bolsonaro could reap 59% of the vote, against 41% for Haddad.
If the race goes in this direction, Brazil – a country that renounced the military dictatorship barely three decades ago – will head to the far right under President Bolsonaro who promises a relentless crackdown on crime and corruption.
This week, the 63-year-old former paratrooper, a gun-friendly parliamentarian backed by influential evangelical groups, warned the "red marginals" of the Workers Party "to go out or go to jail" .
Online language is just as straightforward, mixing truth and lies, or presenting opinions as facts. Many shared messages amplify the past corruption of the Workers Party. Some describe Haddad as trying to promote homosexuality among schoolchildren. Others, those who support Haddad, call Bolsonaro a "fascist" determined to destroy democracy.
– Closed accounts –
Charges of defamation and bad campaigning come and go. The federal police has opened an investigation into "false news" online against both candidates.
The potential of social media to influence the elections in Brazil also evokes the revelations of interference that were issued following the US elections and the Brexit referendum in Britain in 2016.
Facebook, whose reputation is tarnished by these revelations, said Monday it closed 68 pages and 43 accounts related to a Brazilian marketing group, Raposos Fernandes Associates, which, according to media reports, was promoting Bolsonaro online on a large scale.
WhatsApp has announced that it has closed hundreds of thousands of accounts to counter "spam or misinformation," after announcing that several companies had been hired for $ 3 million each to send bundled messages attacking Haddad and the Workers Party. Bolsonaro denied having anything to do with the contracts.
Victoria Grand, WhatsApp's Vice President of Policy and Communication, told reporters in Sao Paulo on Tuesday that the company did not plan to lift the 20-recipient cap for the July messages transferred, down from the previous limit of 250 recipients.
"We are pretty comfortable with this number," she said, implicitly rejecting a call by Bolsonaro last week for the smaller capitalization to be canceled.
Grand said, "I know the timing is critical for Brazil."
WhatsApp is one of the preferred methods of communication in Brazil. The country, 210 million inhabitants, has 120 million WhatsApp users.
– & # 39; Emotionally charged & # 39; –
Legislator, until then obscure, Bolsonaro is a follower of the social media, just like Trump, for which he expressed his admiration.
After being stabbed last month by a single assailant, Bolsonaro has stepped up its online use while recovering. His videos, tweets and Facebook posts have millions of followers, far more than Haddad, a 55-year-old former mayor of Sao Paulo, telegenic but modest.
Even more frustrating for Haddad, Bolsonaro dodged the usual televised debates. Instead of dueling for political reasons, he harangued and attacked his rival on the Internet.
According to a study of the Brazilian presidential election conducted by the University of Oxford, Bolsonaro dominated the conversations on Twitter and "Bolsonaro's supporters have broadcast the largest number of news sources. known ", although Haddad's supporters shared the largest volume.
But Twitter is used by a niche much smaller and better informed than the WhatsApp more generally adopted.
One of the researchers in the study done by the Oxford Internet Institute, Nahema Marchal, said it was "extremely difficult to make any cause-and-effect statements between what people see online and how they vote "and that" every election is different ".
"Like the United States, however, Brazil has seen a number of popular political groups on Facebook being hacked in. There has also been a slight rise in political violence, in a campaign that was bitter and sowed. the division, "she told AFP.
Although the use of digital technology differs from one country to another, "research indicates that disinformation and conspiratorial content circulate faster than factual information on social media", she said, largely because online content "is often the most emotionally charged".
