In the context of the 2018 elections, InternetLab did a series of researches on the dynamics and communications processes, as well as political campaigns in the digital environment — with the projects Você na Mira, #OutrasVoices and researches on political spam and the cost of paid electoral propaganda on the internet — and the relations between electoral rights on the internet — with the Electoral Rights in the Digital Era report. With the result of this cycle of individual and collective researches, we elaborated a document for propositive interventions in the public debate about misinformation and online political campaigns.

The diagnoses, the recommendations, and the strategic agenda presented in the document do not represent a period for the discussion but an effort for it to leave a state of negation, confusion, and lethargy. As much as “fake news” is a subject the has occupied and is still occupying daily discussions about politics — and electoral politics — in Brazil, the conversation about the topic has mobilized ambitious, but rather problematic ideas. Deriving from at times very technocentric points of view — which believe that changing the technology can radically change social processes in a planned manner –, and at others explicitly focused on increasing the control on discourse by state or private agents; many solutions that have inhabited bills and case law discussions bring risks to rights and to the very own effectiveness of the electoral rights in face of its purposes.

With the premise of working from the collection, analysis, and systematizing of data, our goal is to contribute to this debate in a propositive way, defending an approach that is, at the same time, functional and compromised with the guarantee of fundamental rights and democratic values.

Download the full report and its summary [in Portuguese].

Main Points

• The growing use of the internet as a means of communication resulted in significant changes in the configuration of political campaigns. After more than thirty years of the promulgation of the Federal Constitution, the way in which the Brazilian population communicates about politics has changed. The protagonism of radio and written press entered a decline and, at the same time, the internet became more relevant. Currently, Brazil has more than 120 million internet users, with a preponderance of access through mobile phones.
• With its open architecture, the internet has favored the entrance of new stakeholders in the game, reduced the barriers to the production of content and reformulated the role of the audience. If, previously, the communication was mediated by mass communication media, with the positions of producer and consumer being clearly distinctive, now on the internet and new social media, any individual who is online can potentially become a broadcaster of “mass self-communication”, and, with only one online profile, can begin to act on the production and circulation of political information. On the one hand, there has been a decline in the power of choice, mediation, and centralized edition in mass media organizations. On the other, new forms of intermediation, written in the architecture of platforms and in their business models.
• The new intermediation featured by the internet reduces the control of the production and circulation of information characteristic of traditional mass media communication, which has consequences on professional journalism. The rise of these new communication dynamics coincided, in Brazil and in the world, with important processes of social and political polarization. In the convergence of these factors, we observed the emergence of complex phenomenons commonly characterized under the title of fake news. This picture is not a mere product of corporate choices by the internet platforms: the dissemination of propaganda disguised as journalism is a phenomenon that derives from deep changes in the way in which societies produce, circulate, and consume political information. It is a process that involves the very way in which individuals relate themselves with the information, in which the autonomy to produce and share content is increasing in scale.
• This new scenario implied on a crisis of the current electoral regulatory model. Consolidated between 1990-2000, this model operates mainly from the removal of illegal content and the accountability of its authors. But if in the era of television campaigns the “electoral propaganda” was self-evident, with the multiplication of actors and channels it could be everywhere or nowhere, under the control of the campaign or extraneous to it. Without solving the problem, the mobilization of this regulatory model shaped for television and the streets (as if it were a “general” campaign regulation), and the attempt to submit new digital campaign regulation instruments to the logic of mass media, end up aggravating this crisis, producing a “vicious cycle of content control” in which the judiciary turns itself into another stage for campaign performance for the electorate and where demands for strict content controls and filters pose risks to freedom of expression.
• The new mass media landscape has enabled network campaign components to implement new political marketing techniques, with regulation still nascent. The reinvention of political propaganda has not yet neglected another essential aspect of transformation in the media and advertising sector: the collection and processing of personal data. These capabilities paved the way for microtargeting ads to niche audience, to build support networks based on interest segmented contact lists, and for mass dissemination of content in private messaging applications. In fact, 2018 was the first year that paid election advertising was carried out on the internet with official permission to “boost content”. With the sale of electoral ads still under a trial mode, the regulation of the subject has generated doubts and questions, especially about its ability to mitigate practices of improper use of personal data, which are not transparent or that operate outside the rendering of accounts of candidates.
• Real scams in accessing information about public debate, malicious use of robots, fake accounts and other devices also deserve attention. Coupled with the architecture of the internet and its platforms, and running side by side with legitimate uses (such as the transparent use of bots or pseudonym profiles, for example), a number of possibilities for simulating authenticity or spontaneity have also originated. They have made it possible to amplify the visibility or the popularity of particular topics or actors, creating a false impression that they are being discussed more or are spontaneously more popular than they actually are. We identified that the legal protection of such practices is possible, but oversight is still incipient.
• Proposals on how to deal with network campaigns should include new approaches that update the values ​​that must be taken into account in the democratic game rules: pluralism, free speech, equality of opportunity, access to information, and citizens’ autonomy and privacy. Proposals on how to deal with network campaigns should include new approaches that update the values ​​that must be taken into account in the democratic game rules: pluralism, free speech, equality of opportunity, access to information, and citizens’ autonomy and privacy. This makes it necessary not to operate with a logic centered solely on content control, but to focus on inauthentic and abusive behavior. In regard to frauds, this new approach would advocate access to an authentic perception of political debate rather than to a computationally simulated one, pointing to the expansion of the transparency of campaigns and the actions of internet platforms. About privacy and data protection, it means bringing capacities to the electoral law related to the protection of both. Further, it is recommended to deepen the application of current legislation that regulates discriminatory discourses and impacts on the dignity of individuals and social groups, as these discourses also act to exclude, expel and delegitimize voices in the public debate, mitigating the construction of a pluralistic society.