Since the beginning of the year, the number of verifications by the AFP fact-checking team on the October general elections has continued to increase: it quadrupled between January and June.

"In recent months, disinformation about the elections has taken a prominent place on the networks, dethroning the Covid", notes Sergio Lüdtke, coordinator of the Comprova collective, which brings together 42 media involved in the verification of information, including AFP .

According to him, "the pandemic has been transformed into a political event" and has "served as a trial run" for groups that disseminate false information.

And with the approach of the October election, the verification promises to be "much more complex" than previous elections in 2018, he underlines.

In Brazil, most viral election content is about the two big favorites in the race for the top job: current far-right president Jair Bolsonaro and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who ruled on the left from 2003 to 2010. .

Many publications also question the system of electronic ballot boxes in force in the country since 1996.

Evolution of disinformation

Lula is currently well ahead of voting intentions in the first round (47% according to a recent poll by the benchmark institute Datafolha), far ahead of Bolsonaro (28%), while the other candidates share the crumbs, none of them not exceeding 8%.

On October 2, voters will also have to choose their federal and regional deputies, as well as some of the senators.

In 2018, the general elections had already been marked by the massive dissemination of false information, in particular on Whatsapp.

But they were more easily verifiable.

A resident takes a photo of a demonstration in Sao Paulo, August 13, 2019 NELSON ALMEIDA AFP

"Today, we see more and more content which is not necessarily false in itself, but which leads to a misleading interpretation", explains Sergio Lüdtke.

This was demonstrated by AFP in May, by analyzing a tweet questioning the credibility of polling institutes which question "only a thousand people".

This figure is correct, but the interpretation is erroneous: specialists have explained that this sample was completely reliable if the profile of the people questioned was in line with the diversity of the population.

“One of the strategies of those who practice disinformation is to sow doubt among Internet users, by mixing up the facts so much that the reader no longer knows who to trust,” says Pollyana Ferrari, a communication specialist who coordinates information checks. at PUC Catholic University.

New platforms

Since 2018, some platforms have gained more and more followers in Brazil, such as the Telegram messenger or the video applications TikTok and Kwai, which allow visual content to be published quickly and manipulated easily.

It happened, for example, with a video shared more than 100,000 times that appeared to show football fans shouting "Lula, thief" in a full stadium during a match of the Brazilian national football team.

Another audio recording had actually been inserted over the footage, using a feature available on TikTok.

For Pollyana Ferrari, this platform symbolizes the new face of disinformation these days: more dynamic, and with a humorous dimension.

“Like a virus, this false information contaminates the ears, blurs the sight, settles in the mind and hides behind a humor that seems harmless, but becomes an even more formidable vector of transmission,” she says.

The Superior Electoral Court of Brazil, responsible for ensuring the proper conduct of the ballot, is alarmed that "false information or information taken out of context affects value judgments and induces voters to make their choice based on erroneous perceptions of reality".

© 2022 AFP