The NPR Politics Podcast - Brazil's President Sows Distrust In Election — Sound Familiar?

Episode Date: September 29, 2022

As Brazilians head to the polls to vote for president, they're being deluged by a wave of falsehoods that echo Donald Trump's claims of a stolen election. Are there lessons to be learned ahead of future elections in the U.S.?This episode: political correspondent Susan Davis, correspondent Shannon Bond, and voting reporter Miles Parks.Learn more about upcoming live shows of The NPR Politics Podcast at nprpresents.org.Support the show and unlock sponsor-free listening with a subscription to The NPR Politics Podcast Plus. Learn more at plus.npr.org/politics Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org. Hey, it's Asma Khalid from the NPR Politics Podcast, and Atlanta, we want you to come see us live. Join me, Mara Liason, Susan Davis, Tamara Keith, Miles Parks, and Georgia Public Broadcasting's Stephen Fowler as we do our show live at the

Buckhead Theater, Thursday, October 20th at 8 p.m. You can find more information about tickets, including student ones, at nprpresents.org. Thanks to our partners, Georgia Public Broadcasting, WABE, and WCLK Jazz. We hope to see you there. Hi, this is Faith in the Rio Grande River Valley, just north of Albuquerque, New Mexico. My sweet ride is a manual transmission 1997 RAV4 with only 62,693 original miles given to me by my amazing father-in-law. When we moved down here from Alaska last year, the Rad Rav got the royal treatment with a ferry ride to the lower 48 in a train to Albuquerque. This podcast was recorded at 1 10 p.m. on Tuesday, September 27th. Some things may have changed, but my stick shift will still be less likely to be stolen than your automatic transmission. But don't get too close when we're stopped on a hill.

Enjoy the show. I drove stick for many years, and I have a point of pride about it. Yeah, I don't know how. I wish I did. When we were in Hawaii a couple weeks ago, I was desperately wanting to be that guy in the convertible driving stick through the mountains. Just couldn't be that? No, I was in like a really, really boring like new Hyundai. Hey there.

It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And Shannon Bond is back with us from NPR's disinformation team. Hey, Shannon. Hey, Sue.

Hey, Miles. Hello. So here's a Hey, Miles. Hello. So here's a familiar story to our listeners. Rumors of election fraud and a president laying the groundwork to contest election results. This time it's in Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro is up for re-election. Voting begins on Sunday. Shannon, you've done some reporting on this. I mean, this is a country that has faced significant disinformation issues, not unlike our own, even before this election.

That's right. I mean, you only have to look back to 2018 when Bolsonaro was elected. That's an election that some people I spoke to in Brazil, you know, they called it the WhatsApp election because there was just so much viral lies, misleading narratives spreading online, and especially on WhatsApp, right, which is a messaging app owned by Meta, which owns Facebook. And it's kind of hard to overstate how popular WhatsApp is in Brazil. It's used by almost everybody with an internet connection. And what we saw in 2018 was that there are these huge WhatsApp groups, right? People would actually sometimes get added to these groups without even knowing. And then messages were circulating, being forwarded thousands of times. Later on, investigative journalists found that campaigns and Bolsonaro

supporters in some cases were working with marketing firms to send out these bulk WhatsApp messages literally to thousands of people. And so there was just a lot of bad information going around, some attacks on election and voting integrity. But the main thrust of these false narratives back in 2018 were really hot button cultural issues, probably resonates a bit with the US today. Things like gender identity, LGBT tolerance. There was this notorious video that went viral right before the election in 2018 that falsely accused Bolsonaro's opponent of distributing baby bottles with penis-shaped nipples in daycare centers. This was obviously not true, but went wide. And so it really had this impact in Brazil. Now, fast forward to

2022, there have been some changes, and I think we'll get to that. There's still a lot of misleading and outright false information. And as you said, Bolsonaro himself has been promoting this idea of election fraud and attacking the electoral system itself. What is the nature of Bolsonaro's attacks? I mean, I think we know, especially our listeners, that President Trump ahead of the 2020 election sort of consistently laid this groundwork questioning whether the outcome could be legitimate if he didn't win it. Is Bolsonaro basically saying the exact same thing or is there specific things about the information that he's saying? I mean, the overall thrust is very similar, right? It's, yes, the idea you can't trust the election, that Brazil's elections are rigged, even the one that

he won in 2018. You know, his argument is he could have won it by much more if it hadn't been rigged. The specific things to the Brazilian context are Brazil votes with electronic voting machines. And so there's been specific attacks, this idea that you can't be sure that your vote was counted correctly, right, that the votes are being changed. Also sounds very, very familiar. Yeah, very familiar. Yeah. And specifically because the whole country votes that way. It's a bit different than here where you have different states with different systems. But a lot of it, yeah, does sound really reminiscent. And it's just very much

kind of laying the groundwork for kind of no matter what happens for people just not to have confidence in the results. Miles, I have to bring it a little bit back to the U.S. as well, because we're also ahead of a midterm election. And I feel like we've had you on this podcast so many times to talk about these issues happening in the U.S. electorate, but we haven't had you on the concept of disinformation coming out of the 2016 election. And then 2018, we were talking about different aspects of it, but it wasn't as big of an issue, partially because the election itself just wasn't as big of a priority just compared to a presidential election. I think overall, we are doing a little bit better than we were a couple years ago. But I think there's kind of two questions. Is there more or

less disinformation? And are we more or less polarized? Because a polarized electorate, when I talk to experts, people see the American public as just as vulnerable as they were a couple of years ago because of these hot button issues and because of how polarized the electorate is right now. A question I have for both of you, because you both look at this issue from different vantage points. We have been talking about disinformation from a global viewpoint, from a domestic election viewpoint for years now. Do you have any sense of whether people are getting savvier at knowing what is disinformation and what isn't, even if the content is still out there? Is the consumer more wise to what they're seeing? I think there's some degree of that. I mean, talking to fact checkers in Brazil over the

past couple of weeks and journalists who've been covering this, you know, what they've told me is there's a sense that many Brazilians are more skeptical, right, about kind of what is getting spread, what random WhatsApp messages they might be receiving, you know, what people are posting, you know, on Instagram or Facebook. And part of that is just because there's been so much coverage, right? This idea that, you know, 2018 was the WhatsApp election and, you know, people have reported on this and have been a little more vocal. And in Brazil specifically, election authorities have really talked about this as a specific issue and tried to reach agreements with the platforms over how they're handling this type

of content. And so, you know, I think, yes, there is some sense that people maybe are just a little savvier, a little more skeptical. But I think Miles's point about polarization is really important. I mean, like the U.S., Brazil is very politically polarized. And so, you know, you have this smaller portion of the population that's like really dug in, you know, even radicalized. You know, even radicalized, you know, that raises all kinds of concerns just about how vulnerable people are to seeing information that aligns with their prior beliefs and doubling down. And there's also this concern that, you know, especially these kind of fringier apps, so whether it's Getter, which I recently learned is quite popular in Brazil, it's an alternative sort of free speech, quote unquote, focused social network, as well as the messaging app Telegram, which has fewer rules

than an app like WhatsApp. You know, that these could be used not just to spread these false narratives, but to mobilize people, you know, in real life around this idea of a stolen election, much like we saw happen here on January 6th. The other point I would make about skepticism and are people getting better at seeing this stuff is I think it's a two-sided coin because I think you think of that and you're like, oh, people are getting more skeptical of the information they're receiving, which you would think would be a good thing. Like they're maybe investigating it or using their critical thinking a little bit more when they see something on their Facebook or their Twitter feed.

But the downside of that is, at least what we're seeing in America, is that skepticism isn't just to disinformation. It's skeptical of the entire media landscape. And so we're also seeing record low trust in institutional media or what's generally considered reputable media sources. And so when the skepticism is on everything, then I think it's kind of less of a positive. All right. Well, let's take a quick break. And when we get back, we'll talk about what the landscape looks like ahead of Sunday's election.

And we're back. And Shannon, I'm curious what the impact of all of this has been on Bolsonaro's re-election chances. Is he favored to win re-election? How competitive is the race there? Well, as of right now, polls show him trailing his main rival, who's former President Lula. Now, Brazil has a two-round system, right? So there'll be this first round of voting on October 2nd. And it's not clear if Lula, you know, he's ahead in the polls, but it's not clear that he would win outright or if this will head to a second round. So there's sort of some questions there and about how Brazilians may vote differently, you know, in a second round. But Bolsonaro does look to be behind. And interestingly,

even these poll numbers themselves have become targets of disinformation or efforts to sort of undercut trust by Bolsonaro himself and his supporters. Isn't part of the issue, and we saw this here in the U.S., is that, you know, the platform is one thing, but the messenger matters a lot. And when it is the people who are at the heads of institutions or leaders in politics are the ones sort of promoting disinformation, I think it's a lot harder for people to trust a fact check, right? Like if you're already in a position of trust, people are believing what you say even if what you're saying is not the truth. That's right. And I mean, you've seen that. I mean, Bolsonaro, you know, he has used, you know, not just his election rallies, but like appearances and events that are, you know, part of his role as president that, you know, aren't really supposed to be about the election and the campaign, you know, to rail against Brazil's voting machines. I mean, he invited a bunch of ambassadors to a speech where he, like, complained about the voting machines and how you couldn't trust them. You know, and it does.

It creates this, you know, it's just really loud, first of all. I mean, he has a very loud microphone and, you know, people have to cover this, news outlets cover this. And so it does, you know, become, you know, really challenging. And then you, you know, you see these, it's sort of iterative, right? You know, Bolsonaro will make these claims and then you'll see people on social media kind of pick them up and, you know, and create memes around them or say, you know, look, it's just like what's happened in the U.S. So, you know, it feeds on itself. Yeah, I liked how one expert put it around the 2020 election. They called it, they said what makes it really hard to stop is that it's top down and bottom up, where you're getting it from kind of when you're getting it from both sides, it's really, really hard to stop. Well, I also think about it now, again, in our own election

system is that there was this lie, essentially, that the 2020 election was fraudulent. But you're now looking down the ballot at candidates for the 2022 election in races and state, local, federal, everywhere, where you have Republican candidates who are running on this idea that the 2020 election was a fraudulent election. That is inaccurate information. And these are people running for government. Like these are major elections for, you know, that could decide, have any number of impact on our own politics. And so there is an echo effect even from Trump beyond the 2020 election. Yeah. And I think what Shannon's

reporting shows is that that echo effect is not just down ballot in the U.S., it's down ballot to other democracies across the world who might be less developed than the U.S. democracy is. You know, I talked to one voting expert a couple of weeks ago, and what she said is she was at a convention recently with an election expert from another country who said, basically, if you haven't figured this thing out, then how are we supposed to figure this thing out? And so there is this sense that when, you know that when U.S. democracy is being denigrated, that puts democracies around the world at risk. Yeah, they're watching. So Shannon, where do the tech platforms fit into all of this? Are they being more aggressive at trying to not

be the sources of disinformation? I mean, do they have a role to play here? And are they stepping it up at all? Yeah, I mean, whether they have you know, I think it's inarguable that they do have a role to play. You know, I think that there's lots of debate about, you know, is how much have platforms contributed to polarization? How much are they sort of symptomatic of polarization? Like we could have a whole nother show about that, right? But I think they do play a role here. And so, like, as I mentioned, you know, there have been some changes. So specifically in the Brazilian context, right, like after 2018, WhatsApp limited the size of groups and how widely users could forward messages, right, in an effort to sort of stop that really rampant viral spread.

And I would say, you know, one area where platforms have also gotten a lot better, you know, since 2016 is disrupting foreign influence operations. So just this week, Facebook's parent Meta says it's taking down this small network of fake accounts originating in China that were targeting the midterms. They were targeting people across the political spectrum. And one of the things Meta called out in this report was that this network was very small, didn't seem to get much traction, got barely any followership and was caught pretty quickly. And so for them, that's a real win, right?

That's much more cut and dry. They can just take that stuff down. I think what's much more difficult is that when it comes to these election policies they put in place, you know, not just in Brazil, but for the U.S. midterms, we're seeing a lot of the same policies that were used in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. So they're relying on fact checkers. They're, you know, labeling content in some cases, you know, that may be questionable or false. They're providing a lot of information about, you know, how to vote, who your candidates are. And so I think, you know, it's much easier for them when they can point to things that are really like kind of straight out fact checkable or falsifiable. But what we've seen about disinformation and sort of these conspiracy narratives especially is that they kind of morph into claims that are not so easily falsifiable and that are kind of much more gray area.

Or they're spreading, you know, stories that are about real things happening, but they're being framed in a way that's misleading. And it's much harder for the platforms, given what they're trying to do in terms of balance the right to free speech against, you know, safety. Which is a very important freedom, I should note, as journalists. We care deeply about that. Exactly. And they don't want to say, like, you can't share a news story about something. But this is something Miles reported on this, you know, around COVID, right, with like people who are opposed to vaccines, who were sort of using news stories about people who died after getting a vaccine, not, you know, that didn't make any claim about causality, but using those to say, look, the vaccines are unsafe.

And it's, you know, the platforms are really hesitant in a lot of cases to say you can't share that kind of story. All right, let's leave it there for today. But we should note before we go, Meta, which owns Facebook and WhatsApp, pays NPR to license NPR content. Shannon, thanks so much for joining the podcast. Thanks for having me. I'm Susan Davis.

I cover politics. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.