How disinformation, driven by robots and expressing hatred, can end lives in this election.
By Renata Neves
Source: Reproduction
This is an election year full of lies. Brazilians are being bombarded with false news (fake news), hate speech that violates the basic rights of minorities, and bots that try to generate negative impacts on social media.
The process of disinformation is old and has always been present in our lives. Today, the phenomenon is overwhelming — that is, we are at a point where everything we receive can be grounds for suspicion.
The purpose of spreading false information can range from increasing visibility to selling a product or an idea. And this same strategy is being used during the election period.
In an attempt to exalt candidates, and especially the current government, ordinary people are also sharing false information through various channels.
In this sense, innocence or a lack of knowledge leads to consequences such as trust in public figures who harm our country.
There is also violence as one of the consequences of disinformation. This happens when hate speech is spread among groups or individuals who share the same ideas, whether sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, prejudiced and so on.
Some people feel entitled to belittle or attack other individuals, especially after receiving information that does not contradict their thinking.
On top of that, discussions on social media are being used to drive engagement among users and influence political positions.
So, in posts about political subjects, it is possible to find enormous quantities of identical comments, probably automated by bots imitating real people.
If you are still unclear about how a piece of fake news is capable of harming our elections and your life, then keep reading, because we need to talk.
The “power” of disinformation in elections
A piece of fake news, or a false story, is a publication made to look real and to go viral quickly.
In this way, malicious people manage to spread an idea with the help of users or even opinion influencers.
The strategy works when the producer of the false information creates content that is eye-catching, emotional and provocative.
It is then published on dubious websites or spread among telephone numbers that have been illegally obtained. Eventually, the people who identify with the ideas are encouraged to keep sending the content on to their acquaintances.
That way, readers associate the information with truthfulness without doing any further research and end up falling into this trap.
Those responsible for, and interested in, the spread of false content are politicians in election campaigns or groups that intend to bring down their targets. Meanwhile, the producers of the fakes are people who are almost impossible to trace.
As a consequence, discourses of violence, lynching, prejudice and panic move out of social media and start happening more markedly in everyday life, resulting in deaths, assaults, traumas and more.
On the other hand, the interest in fake news also involves a great deal of money and transactions. In other words, the people involved in this process are profiting from keeping the population in the dark.
This, in short, is the situation of our country in an election year.
The emergence of fake news
In 2016, in the United States, the presidential race was under way. That was when the term “fake news” became popular, though in truth the idea of sharing false information to bring down a rival has always existed.
For those who do not remember, Donald Trump was a candidate with extreme and prejudiced rhetoric, in a context of economic crisis in the country.
His victory, however, came about mainly after dubious websites spread fake news and sensationalist content. Such as the site Breitbart, which was countered by the Sleeping Giants movement.
You can understand more about the crisis in the United States with a video by clicking here.
Now, did you know that defaming candidates existed even before the internet?
In the 16th century, candidates for the papacy publicly disparaged their competitors through attack texts with poems posted in public places. Unlike today, when all we need is the internet.
Even back then, great writers were paid to produce a satirical text about an opponent, even if the impact was only local.
What are social media platforms doing about it?
Since 2018, social media platforms have been moving more intensively against false content and bots. It is therefore important to know how the big tech companies are dealing with their users in election years.
The measures already being taken before February 2022 can be summed up as identifying and blocking the circulation of fake news and fake profiles.
TikTok, for example, is one of the platforms that does not accept paid political advertising, because the platform’s focus is on remaining a space of freedom and expression for its users.
Meanwhile Twitter, which is also a platform that bans paid political advertising, identified hundreds of robots in the 2018 elections. The platform stated that it would continue its monitoring to prevent more fake accounts from being created and tweeting.
Meta, however, had to concentrate its measures against disinformation on the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms. There were account blocks, the removal of boosted content and the verification of information with independent partners.
On 15 February 2022, the TSE and representatives of the platforms signed an agreement to combat disinformation in this election year.
The partnership aims to neutralise false information, combat hatred, prevent conspiracy theories against democracy, report mass messaging campaigns and prioritise official information until 31 December of this year. Representatives of Google, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok and Kwai were included.
Do bots vote in this year’s election?
Let us say you are looking at a post on Instagram and decide to read the comments to understand what most people are thinking.
If the content is about politics or taking sides, it is quite likely that there will be several identical comments, with the same words or emojis.
This is one of the jobs of bots and fake accounts, with the added advantage of generating more engagement and giving prominence to names for a period of time.
Robots are automation tools for the web. When they are used for purposes of manipulation, it is possible to create thousands of accounts to act before the platforms’ monitoring recognises them.
There are bots that are widely used during political discussions purely to boost a name or a specific piece of content. On the other hand, they still run the risk of influencing the opinion of users who are following the subject.
Although social media companies recognise the existence of bots, there are no immediate actions to remove the accounts, and so thousands of them carry on running across the platforms.
Furthermore, this year, Twitter users identified an absurd increase in the number of followers of the current president and his supporters. And this can also be characterised as action by bots.
It is important to stress that, at the end of it all, a bot does not vote — but it can boost public figures, give prominence to names and alter voters’ perspectives. A very well planned and executed strategy.
Are bots good or bad?
It is important to widen our concept of bots and to see that there is more than one type, with different intentions: web robots, chatbots, spambots and social bots.
You have probably dealt with all of the above, not least because among them there are robots used only to make processes easier and others that try to manipulate your opinions.
Starting with web robots: these are made to archive, access or crawl files. For example, they are the ones responsible for finding and delivering the pages you search for on Google.
Chatbots, in turn, are automations for holding a dialogue with human beings and humanising that interaction. Like Siri and Alexa, there are bots used on WhatsApp to make a quick conversation between an agent and a consumer easier.
These types of bots are important and useful for giving you a good experience. It is more worthwhile to have a quick conversation with a robot than to wait in a queue until a human being is available to serve you by message.
However, there are spam bots and those that act on social media, and these do need more monitoring in order to be identified.
Robots that fire off spam — that is, content with commercial advertising or viruses en masse — are common. Generally, email inboxes can already spot some of these bots and mark them as suspicious, but care is always needed when opening an email or clicking on links.
Finally, there are social bots, which are our focus in this article. They are designed to manipulate social media users by pretending to be real people.
Not all fake accounts need human intervention; some are already set up to steal personal data or spread disinformation. For that they only need to post links or messages of support or defamation.
When the focus is engagement, for Twitter for example, all it would take is for a number of fake users to start a discussion mentioning a name and drawing the attention of real people to carry on the debate.
Political bots are automated to simulate patterns of human behaviour, such as posting times, and to affect people’s perceptions. Fake news then comes in at this point to lend false credibility and spread ideas.
Bot technology can go further: they are capable of replying naturally, following other people, stealing real accounts and altering existing posts.
Their functions are extensive and dangerous, but worst of all is that they are almost unidentifiable, since they clone human behaviour. If you spot a possible robot on social media, the best thing is always to report it to the platform.
Cases and studies of bots in an election year
To explain better how bots act during elections, we have decided to set out complete and detailed studies for you to inform yourself.
Better than a brief summary, you can analyse these authors’ research methods and draw your own conclusions about their veracity. But we are confident the material will be very useful in opening your eyes.
In the previous section, we based the information on the article “O uso de bots sociais como ameaça à democracia” written by Mateus de Oliveira Fornasier. In it, you can understand bots in the political sphere, how they act and the danger they represent for elections.
The material “Bots e o Direito Eleitoral brasileiro” explains the process of disinformation by bots with a focus on the electoral process. You will also gain more clarity about the TSE’s actions to deal with this threat.
The study “Detecção automática de bots em redes sociais: um estudo de caso no segundo turno das eleições presidenciais brasileiras de 2018” worked to identify the percentage of possible bots in a sample of tweets. It is therefore a very interesting text for recognising the practical side of social bots.
If you are thinking about the electoral process in the United States, which was marked by mass disinformation, the article “A influência das Fake News nos Processos Eleitorais do Brasil e dos Estados Unidos“ may be a good reference for you.
In any case, it is not enough to know how bots work; we need to pay more attention when we are browsing social media so as not to end up cooperating with a fake account.
Hate speech during the Brazilian elections
After false content is fired off en masse to manipulate people, we see the rise of hate speech across the internet. Unfortunately, this speech is carried outside the networks and results in a great deal of violence.
The history of the world is marked by groups repressing, injuring, belittling and even killing other minority groups and individuals. In other words, people have always tended to find an “enemy” to hate and look down on, just as they also look for a “hero” in their narratives.
Generally, these targets for enemies are minority groups, exclusively because of their differences. Any aspect different from the “normal” can be a motivation for social exclusion, contempt or revulsion.
Hate speech is typically based on racist thinking, supports misogyny, sexism, chauvinism, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism, or stands against the right to life and freedom.
Speaking of political violence, we can state that any group is at risk of verbal and physical threat, especially those that are already historically diminished.
And, despite countless reports, some individuals decide to defend their ideas as “mere opinions”. Editora Fórum, on the other hand, states that to distinguish hate speech from opinion it is important first to understand the concept of vulnerability and to have a sense of stigma. We will look at that further on, all right?
Political violence also has one more consequence that damages our democracy.
Brazilians, afraid of becoming another victim, start avoiding political subjects at home, at work and at school, unwittingly cooperating with the disinformation and estrangement of the people they know.
So the hate speech that occurs in election years is reinforced by disinformation and boosted on the networks, to the point of leaving the internet and causing real disasters.
Shall we put our cards on the table?
If you do not agree with what has been set out above, this may be a very worrying sign of denialism or of comfort with the situation. Take note, because there is still time to study, review your outlook on life and take in the world around you.
We have political leaders who promote attacks and violence against “enemies”, in the same way that other foreign nations have also sought to unite their people to exterminate whoever went against the rules. In other words, Brazil is also dealing with fascism.
It is important to remember that fascism is a political movement that justifies the breaking of democratic institutions, such as violence against an “enemy” of the nation, through discourses about morality, decency and heroism.
Moreover, these discourses are accepted thanks to the denialism of the population and of certain groups. Let us clarify from the outset that by “denialism” we mean the act of not accepting or not believing information that has already been proven or studied by academics, scientists and researchers.
Political violence
To illustrate the consequences of hate speech in an election period, we will present more data on the subject.
The research below sums up a little of our Brazilian reality; remember, though, to keep researching the subject in depth. We are focusing on 2022, but political violence has been happening for a long time and there are further studies covering other periods.
The research on political violence carried out by the Rede de Ação Política pela Sustentabilidade (RAPS) in partnership with the Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública (FBSP) studied the results of Datafolha interviews and arrived at the equivalent of 5.3 million people who declared themselves victims of threats because of their political position.
In a survey by the newspaper Estadão, 26 politically motivated murders were recorded.
In addition, the Observatory of Political and Electoral Violence at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (Unirio) gathered more than 200 records of threats, attacks and assaults against political leaders between the first and second quarters of 2022. You can see more details at this link.
The numbers alarm specialists and mark 2022 as one of the most violent years on political grounds. These are not just statistics; it is the way Brazilians are revealing their position.
On 24 September, Antônio Carlos Silva de Lima, aged 39, was stabbed and died in a bar in the interior of Ceará after confirming his vote for the PT.
On 10 September, Marcelo Arruda, on his 50th birthday, was killed with two shots at his party themed around the former president Lula.
On 15 July, a drone flew over a political event and dropped faeces and urine on the participants.
On 7 September, the Bolsonaro-supporting voter Cassio Cenalli filmed a video refusing food to an elderly woman who said she supported the PT.
And the list of cases goes on, with more acts of violence that received media attention and others that may have happened without our even knowing.
Freedom of expression and hate speech are different!
Whenever there is a discussion about ideas, thoughts or positions, political or otherwise, some individuals seek to invoke the right to freedom of expression in order to say what they think.
Right afterwards come sentences expressing their aggression and intolerance. So does that mean freedom of expression protects the intolerant? And to what extent do we have to accept and respect someone else’s opinion?
To answer that, we need to go back to the Constitution (article 11) to understand that freedom of expression is a right in favour of intellectual, artistic, scientific and communicative freedom. That is, we do not need to worry about censorship.
However, both the Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights also guarantee that each person may live without being discriminated against for who they are, how they were born or how they practise their beliefs.
Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”
So let us return briefly to the concepts of “opinion” and “freedom of expression” and understand how they do not justify hate speech.
According to Editora Fórum, hate speech is an overstepping of freedom of expression and, as a result, is not tolerated by the courts. That overstepping would be the contribution to, or reinforcement of, the process of stigmatisation against vulnerable groups. But hold on — let us translate that.
In other words, freedom becomes an expression of hatred when a person’s characteristics are associated with disparagement, creating a false perception of reality. Normally, targeting groups that are already susceptible to discrimination because of their differences.
For example, claiming that homosexuality is responsible for cases of AIDS amounts to taking a characteristic of a group that is already discriminated against and associating it with a disease. All of it without scientific or academic proof.
The power of information in elections
We have good news for you: disinformation can and must be fought.
As mentioned earlier, this whole situation in elections is not new and certainly did not begin this year. Many organisations, people and institutions have created ways of fighting disinformation in the country.
And you are part of that fight, which is why knowing methods to shrink this insane market of falsehood should also be a priority.
In fact, imagine that identifying the threats to democracy were like collecting rubbish and that, in the end, with everyone’s work, we would be able to clean up Brazil more effectively.
Ready to change the way you browse the internet?
How to identify fake news?
When you receive information about the elections and it seems suspicious to you, follow these steps:
- Read the content in full to make sure there are no contradictions within the text or sentences that disprove earlier ones;
- Look closely at the text. Is its structure suspicious? Are there spelling errors? Does the formatting look odd?
- Identify the site, the author and the sources used. Normally news stories and articles, like this one, make their sources easily accessible to users;
- Note the publication date and the dates mentioned in the text; they must not be inconsistent or confused;
- Search for the same subject on other sites or platforms, and turn to official sites as well;
- Do not share anything without checking!
To find out more and master the art of fighting fakes, we have set aside a free online course for you. Visit Vaza Falsiane by clicking here!
Avoiding bots
Difficult though it may be to identify advanced social bots, it is still possible to report the ones you do recognise. The next list is to help you learn to identify a malicious robot.
- Platforms accept bots that declare themselves as robots and send messages that do not break the rules, so determine whether the bot you are dealing with is declared or not.
- Look at the user’s name; sometimes it may be very random or fail to match the profile;
- If you can, analyse the content of the profile. Check the number of posts, the performance, the time gap between each post…
- Note whether the profile picture comes from a stock image bank, whether it is widely used or whether there is none at all;
- Be suspicious of profiles with few followers but a great deal of success in their content;
- Do you think a profile might be a bot? Report it on the platform itself.
Remember that malicious bots not only share disinformation but can also steal personal data, so do not interact with them under any circumstances and do not click on unknown links.
Let us report electoral hate speech
Now that you know how to recognise hate speech, know that it is possible to make a report in order to protect your rights and those of others. On identifying attacks, threats and other forms of political violence on the internet, you should:
- Not interact;
- Not name names;
- Take screenshots and records with date and time, if possible;
- Save the link to the page or the app;
- Report it on the Safernet site.
We hope the content of this article has been enlightening and useful for you. Vote with awareness and, above all, free of disinformation. See you soon!
References
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FORNASIER, Mateus de Oliveira. O uso de bots sociais como ameaça à democracia. Revista Brasileira de Políticas Públicas (RBPP). Available at: .
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Bots e o Direito Eleitoral brasileiro. FGV. Available at: .
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Detecção automática de bots em redes sociais: um estudo de caso no segundo turno das eleições presidenciais brasileiras de 2018. Revista FSMA, n. 24, 2019. Available at: .
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SOUZA, Giovana R. A influência das Fake News nos Processos Eleitorais do Brasil e dos Estados Unidos. Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie. Available at: .