According to a recent report from a social media watchdog organisation, Meta has benefited from the spread of advertisements and posts making false claims about Brazilian election security and candidates.
The report compares this to the rise of “Stop the Steal” rhetoric that sparked the deadly Capitol Riot on January 6.
Early in September, SumOfUs, a nonprofit rights group that has previously produced research drawing attention to sexual harassment on Meta’s metaverse platforms, released the study titled “Stop the Steal 2.0: How Meta is destroying Brazilian democracy.”
The research was released before Brazil’s first round of voting in October as well as Wednesday’s celebration of the country’s independence, which far-right President Jair Bolsonaro used to galvanise partisan support.
Bolsonaro, who has previously made exaggerated claims about election integrity and hinted that he would not accept the results this time around, urged his followers to “go to the streets for the final time” on Independence Day and “swear to offer my life for freedom.”
The opposition’s Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva, who presided over Brazil from 2003 to 2010, is presently ahead of the incumbent in the polls.
A number of examples of advertisements and posts on the Meta-owned Facebook were included in SumOfUs’ analysis, which researchers discovered from a batch of samples linked to popular hashtags.
These examples include advertisements that the report claims violate Brazil’s election rule, which prohibits candidates from trying to win votes before August 16.
A press release accompanying the research claims that the cumulative sum of impressions for the Meta-approved advertisements exceeded 600,000.
According to the study, one of Ellen Miziara’s political campaign ads had between 60 and 70,000 views and pushed viewers to “So let’s fight,” he continued, “let’s go to the streets. Fight for our nation, together! I’m heading to the streets on September 7—will you join me?”
According to the article, a Bolsanaro party advertisement that received a few thousand impressions implied that surveys showing Lula ahead of Bolsanaro were fake.
Some comments criticise Lula. According to the allegation, political ally and Bolsonaro supporter Otoni de Paula published an advertisement with 20,000 views that implied without providing any proof that the Brazilian “Supreme Court and Lula are collaborating to arrest Bolsonaro.”
According to the study, one advertisement erroneously claimed that Lula stole money, and another incorrectly claimed that Lula was responsible for the 2002 murder of former Santo mayor Andre Celso Daniel.
According to the research, right-wing extremists have long used Telegram and the popular WhatsApp platform, both of which are owned by Meta, to propagate extremist messages about planning a coup.
According to the study, SumOfUs researchers spent a day analysing 18,000 new messages in five Telegram groups and discovered that they replicated WhatsApp content with “incitation to violence, calls to military action, and the glorification of violence.”
The study calls on Meta to undertake more thorough content filtering and enhance its ad clearance procedure. Meta did not react to Insider’s request for comment.
In the press release for the report, Flora Rebello Arduini, the programme director at SumOfUs, referred to the rise of this rhetoric in Brazil as “January 6th all over again” and stated that “regulators around the world need to take urgent action, or we’ll only see these kinds of attacks on democracy intensify.”