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The President of the Higher Electoral Tribunal, Rosa Weber, meets with the President of the Workers 'Party, Gleisi Hoffmann, at a meeting with the leaders of the Workers' Party, at the headquarters of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, at Brasilia, Brazil, Friday, October 19th. , 2018. Haddad's camp accused the far-right opponent of illegal campaign practices for allegedly allowing friendly businessmen to secretly pay defamatory messages. (Eraldo Peres / Associated Press)
SAO PAULO – The WhatsApp mail service said Friday that it had sent letters of "cessation and abandonment" to prevent companies from sending messages en masse regarding the election of the Brazil, after businessmen announced that they were funding a campaign for right-wing presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro.
The service also banned the accounts of these companies after the publication Thursday in the newspaper Folha S.Paulo of an anti-explosion email campaign scheduled for the week before the second round on October 28.
The courier also said that it had banned hundreds of thousands of accounts since the month of August, when the election campaign had officially started in Brazil, using a spam detection technology to identify those who "behave abnormally".
Bolsonaro's rival, Fernando Haddad, said that, if it were true, this scheme would constitute an illegal campaign practice, he asked the Brazilian Electoral Tribunal to conduct an investigation. Haddad, candidate of the Left Labor Party after the ban on former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva because of a corruption charge, claimed that hundreds of thousands of fake messages had already been sent to support the hope of the far right. .
Bolsonaro said any support he received from businessmen was voluntary and his social and liberal party declared that all donations received were legal.
WhatsApp said in a statement that he was taking the allegation seriously. He declined to name the companies to which he sent the letters, but the Folha report identified marketing companies that would have received money for messaging. None of the companies mentioned responded immediately to requests for confirmation of the receipt of the letters "stop and abstain".
WhatsApp is immensely popular in Brazil, which has nearly one in ten users in the world, but this issue has been the subject of close scrutiny during this election while the we are worried about whether false or manipulated messages influence voters. False information is a topic of concern on many social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, but WhatsApp is harder to control because users exchange information directly and rumors can gain credibility as they are shared privately with friends.
Later, members of the Workers' Party of Haddad met in Brasilia the President of the Electoral Court of Brazil. President Gleisi Hoffmann has expressed concern that there is no quick response to avoid the wave of false news before the second round of 28 October.
"I leave this meeting with a lot of concerns about the court's ability to cope with this new situation in the electoral process," Hoffmann told reporters. "Yesterday, we filed a lawsuit to request searches to gather evidence and, until now, the court has not yet made a decision. The court will treat this complaint as if we were normally, so I am very worried. "
Haddad also criticized Friday the electoral court of Brazil. "We have an analogue justice system dealing with digital problems," he told reporters in Rio de Janeiro.
The highest electoral court in Brazil was scheduled to hold a press conference on false news and electoral crimes, but it was postponed until Sunday. No details were given about the change.
Messaging announced Friday that Bolsonaro's son Flavio's account had been blocked a few days earlier for spam users. Flavio Bolsonaro, an elected senator from Rio de Janeiro, tweeted on Friday that his account was banned, but a few hours later, he said he had been unblocked. The company could not immediately confirm that the account had been reinstated.
"The persecution knows no bounds!" Flavio Bolsonaro said Friday when he tweeted Friday when he had announced that his account had been blocked. Jair Bolsonaro's campaign has often claimed that mainstream media and others were working against the leader's candidacy.
WhatsApp noted that an account of former president Dilma Rousseff, a member of the rival workers' party and candidate for the senate in this election, was also blocked during her campaign.
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The editors of the associated press, Stan Lehman and Mauricio Savarese, contributed to this report.
Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, disseminated, rewritten or redistributed.
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