Tuesday, August 16, 2022

Brazil’s presidential campaign launches amid fears of violence and upheaval

Andrew Downie
Tue, August 16, 2022 

Campaigning in Brazil’s most important election for years formally gets under way this week amid fears of political violence on the campaign trail and possible turmoil before and after the October ballots.

Far-right president Jair Bolsonaro is trailing in the polls and has hinted he will not give up power if defeated by the leftist frontrunner and former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.


A woman holds a fan with the image of ‘Lula’ da Silva during a Black Women’s March in Rio de Janeiro, 31 July. Photograph: Bruna Prado/AP

A former army captain, Bolsonaro has sharpened his rhetoric in recent weeks, telling foreign diplomats that Brazil’s electronic voting system is not reliable and ordering army officers to monitor the source code used in more than half a million ballot boxes.

His supporters have attacked two Lula rallies in recent weeks, throwing faeces, urine and a crude explosive device at Lula backers, as well as shooting dead one prominent Workers’ party official in the western city of Foz de Iguaçu.

Politicians and poll watchers fear that political violence will only escalate ahead of the 2 October elections for president, congress and 27 state governors.

“There is real reason for concern because even though political violence has been a fact of life here for years the situation today has been exacerbated by the way Bolsonaro has promoted violent discourse as a way to resolve political conflicts,” said Pablo Nunes, head of the CESeC thinktank.


On the national stage, Lula’s security details have requested more manpower to deal with the threats and the 76-year-old now wears a bulletproof vest at public events. His campaign kicks off this week with rallies in São Paulo and Belo Horizonte.

Ironically, the most prominent victim of violence in recent years is Bolsonaro, who was stabbed at a campaign event in September 2018, just weeks before the election that brought him to power.

He spent three weeks in hospital and was forced to undergo surgeries as a result of the attack, carried out by a lone assailant with mental health problems.

The incident, though, did not temper his outlook.


Jair Bolsonaro during a March for Jesus Christ in Rio de Janeiro on Saturday. 
Photograph: Mauro Pimentel/AFP/Getty Images

The former army captain was already notorious for his love of weapons and his close links to the military, where he served for 15 years. One of his trademark moves is to make a gun with his thumb and index finger and he once joked he would like to “strafe” members of the Workers’ party.

It was only weeks after taking power that his justice minister sought to reduce punishment for law enforcement officials who killed suspects while acting with “excusable fear, surprise or violent emotion”.

The wording was removed from the eventual bill but under Bolsonaro’s watch congress has passed 20 different measures making it easier to buy weapons. In the first two years of his government alone the number of gun licenses issued in Brazil rose by 65% to more than 1m, according to the NGO Instituto Sou da Paz.

Bolsonaro, a former paratrooper, has also spent much of the last year undermining the electoral system, repeating baseless claims about the reliability of Brazil’s electronic ballot boxes and insulting the judges who preside over the supreme electoral court, which organises the election and sanctions results.

He has hinted at the possibility of closing congress and in May told evangelical voters that “Only God can remove me” – a comment that prompted fears of a Trump-like insurrection if the vote goes against him.

“There is good reason to fear a possible Brazilian January 6 kind of situation,” said Nunes. “The conditions are there for this to happen.”

Although Bolsonaro has the backing of many in the military, it is unclear whether the top brass would support any attempt to subvert the democratic process.

Bolsonaro, though, is obviously preparing his supporters for action. Last week he told agricultural leaders, “Buy your guns! It’s in the Bible!”

“He is doing it to focus attention away from the country’s real problems and frighten the opposition, as well as to keep his militant base charged,” said Felipe Borba, the coordinator of a political violence thinktank at Rio’s Unirio university.

“It’s also done to prepare his side for a violent reaction if they lose.”

Borba said Bolsonaro wants to accumulate chips for the high-stakes poker game that will come after the election, which will go to a runoff on 30 October if no candidate gets a majority on 2 October.

A congressional inquiry into his disastrous handling of the pandemic – 680,000 Brazilians perished from the Covid-19 virus, more than any other country outside the United States – accused the president of nine offences, including crimes against humanity. He also faces charges related to his spread of fake news.

If he loses, he could face jail time and those close to the president said he is terrified at the prospect. Borba believes the sabre-rattling is a tactic aimed “at gaining power in any possible amnesty negotiation for him and his family. He needs to show strength.”


Bolsonaro continues to trail in the polls with one study this week giving Lula a 12-point lead, although the gap has narrowed slightly in recent weeks.

Lula remains the favourite but Bolsonaro has the government machine at his disposal and has already increased the amount of monthly aid handouts given to 18 million of Brazil’s poorest families.

Whether that will be enough to close the gap remains to be seen but political analysts said the incumbent can win only by taking votes directly from Lula.

“If he keeps growing by consolidating votes from those who in theory should be voting for him, the kind of people who hate Lula more than anything and who were maybe not entirely happy with his government, then that won’t change the game,” said Vítor Oliveira, a political scientist with the Pulso Público consultancy.

“He needs to take votes from Lula to win; there is no other way.”


Strike four: Facebook misses election misinfo in Brazil ads
By BARBARA ORTUTAY
yesterday

An iPhone displays the Facebook app in New Orleans, Aug. 11, 2019. Facebook failed to detect election-related misinformation in ads ahead of Brazil's 2022 election, a new report from Global Witness has found, continuing a pattern of not catching material that violates its policies the group says is “alarming.” 
(AP Photo/Jenny Kane, File)


Facebook failed to detect blatant election-related misinformation in ads ahead of Brazil’s 2022 election, a new report from Global Witness has found, continuing a pattern of not catching material that violates its policies the group describes as “alarming.”

The advertisements contained false information about the country’s upcoming election, such as promoting the wrong election date, incorrect voting methods and questioning the integrity of the election — including Brazil’s electronic voting system.

This is the fourth time that the London-based nonprofit has tested Meta’s ability to catch blatant violations of the rules of its most popular social media platform— and the fourth such test Facebook has flubbed. In the three prior instances, Global Witness submitted advertisements containing violent hate speech to see if Facebook’s controls — either human reviewers or artificial intelligence — would catch them. They did not.

“Facebook has identified Brazil as one of its priority countries where it’s investing special resources specifically to tackle election related disinformation,” said Jon Lloyd, senior advisor at Global Witness. “So we wanted to really test out their systems with enough time for them to act. And with the U.S. midterms around the corner, Meta simply has to get this right — and right now.”

Brazil’s national elections will be held on Oct. 2 amid high tensions and disinformation threatening to discredit the electoral process. Facebook is the most popular social media platform in the country. In a statement, Meta said it has “ prepared extensively for the 2022 election in Brazil.”

“We’ve launched tools that promote reliable information and label election-related posts, established a direct channel for the Superior Electoral Court (Brazil’s electoral authority) to send us potentially-harmful content for review, and continue closely collaborating with Brazilian authorities and researchers,” the company said.

In 2020 Facebook began requiring advertisers who wish to run ads about elections or politics to complete an authorization process and include “paid for by” disclaimers on them, similar to what it does in the U.S. The increased safeguards follow the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, when Russia used rubles to pay for political ads designed to stoke divisions and unrest among Americans.

Global Witness said it broke these rules when it submitted the test ads (which were approved for publication but were never actually published). The group placed the ads from outside Brazil, from Nairobi and London, which should have raised red flags.

It was also not required to put a “paid for by” disclaimer on the ads and did not use a Brazilian payment method — all safeguards Facebook says it had put in place to prevent misuse of its platform by malicious actors trying to intervene in elections around the world.

“What’s quite clear from the results of this investigation and others is that their content moderation capabilities and the integrity systems that they deploy in order to mitigate some of the risk during election periods, it’s just not working,” Lloyd said.

The group is using ads as a test and not regular posts because Meta claims to hold advertisements to an “even stricter” standard than regular, unpaid posts, according to its help center page for paid advertisements.

But judging from the four investigations, Lloyd said that’s not actually clear.

“We we are constantly having to take Facebook at their word. And without a verified independent third party audit, we just can’t hold Meta or any other tech company accountable for what they say they’re doing,” he said.

Global Witness submitted ten ads to Meta that obviously violated its policies around election-related advertising. They included false information about when and where to vote, for instance and called into question the integrity of Brazil’s voting machines — echoing disinformation used by malicious actors to destabilize democracies around the world.

In another study carried out by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, researchers identified more than two dozen ads on Facebook and Instagram, for the month of July, that promoted misleading information or attacked the country’s electronic voting machines.

The university’s internet and social media department, NetLab, which also participated in the Global Witness study, found that many of those had been financed by candidates running for a seat at a federal or state legislature.

This will be Brazil’s first election since far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who is seeking reelection, came to power. Bolsonaro has repeatedly attacked the integrity of the country’s electronic voting system.

“Disinformation featured heavily in its 2018 election, and this year’s election is already marred by reports of widespread disinformation, spread from the very top: Bolsonaro is already seeding doubt about the legitimacy of the election result, leading to fears of a United States-inspired January 6 ‘stop the steal’ style coup attempt,” Global Witness said.

In its previous investigations, the group found that Facebook did not catch hate speech in Myanmar, where ads used a slur to refer to people of East Indian or Muslim origin and call for their deaths; in Ethiopia, where the ads used dehumanizing hate speech to call for the murder of people belonging to each of Ethiopia’s three main ethnic groups; and in Kenya, where the ads spoke of beheadings, rape and bloodshed.
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Associated Press Writer Diane Jeantet contributed to this story.

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