The blogger Allan dos Santos, a follower of Bolsonaro, together with the Federal Police during the investigation into the dissemination of false news last May in Brasilia.ADRIANO MACHADO / Reuters
More than 1,500 videos have disappeared from
YouTube last week. The content, which was found on 267 of the main channels of the extreme right in Brazil, was deleted, made private by its users or even deleted by the social network itself. For three days in a row, more than 400 videos were removed daily. Guilherme Felitti, founder of Novelo Digital, the digital analysis company that produced the study, says that the event has attracted attention due to its unprecedented nature. "These days when hundreds of videos have disappeared is unprecedented," he says. “What we had seen before were days of great cleaning followed by moments of calm, something very punctual. The cleaning that we are seeing, from the action of the TSE [Superior Electoral Tribunal], is continuous. "
The accelerated race for the massive deletion of videos that attack democracy, spread
fake news
and repeatedly threaten the authorities began on Tuesday the 17th. At the request of the Federal Police, the TSE prohibited social networks from paying the Bolsonarista pages investigated by spread fake news. The request was accompanied by the sending of a report in which the Federal Police indicated the
modus operandi
of the Bolsonarista support network on the internet.
And it establishes a direct connection between the strategy used by Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's strategist in the 2016 campaign, and the channels linked to the Brazilian president.
Attacking the traditional media, disqualifying contrary positions, reaching the public directly and without intermediaries, dispelling the distinction between what is information and what is opinion: all this method is in Trump's script, which Bolsonaro's followers follow to the letter, according to the Federal Police document to which EL PAÍS has had access.
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The Police report adds to the approval, by the Parliamentary Investigation Commission of the Pandemic, of the lifting of the fiscal and financial secrecy of Bolsonarista bloggers such as Allan do Santos and Leandro Ruschel, and of channels of support for the president in the social networks.
The succession of reactions of the Justice before the propagators of hoaxes tightens the fence on the main platform of support for Bolsonaro at a time when his popularity is plummeting.
Cornered by suspicions of corruption in the negotiation of vaccines and the management of the pandemic, the president raises the tone in his anti-democratic speech and of attacking the electronic ballot box.
And it carries with it a flood of content spread on the internet with false information or news with partial data that lead to erroneous conclusions.
Diogo Rais, professor of electoral law and technology at Mackenzie University, warns precisely about that tug of war between the actions of Bolsonaro and his followers and the reaction of Justice.
"I closely follow many Bolsonarist groups and I see the anger behind each measure taken by the Judiciary," he says.
“In that sense, [the action of Justice] can be a shot in the foot in the fight against political hatred and polarization.
The democratic maturity of the institutions is being tested as never before. "
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The monitoring carried out by Novelo Digital shows, however, that the actions of the Justice inhibit false content on certain channels. "We already saw all the rush to delete videos when the Federal Police carried out, in June 2020, the first action against
fake news,
" says Guilherme Felitti. "It was the first time those
YouTubers
realized that they couldn't say what they wanted," he says. At that time, the Police took to the streets with search warrants against 21 people, including the publicist Sergio Lima and the businessman Luís Felipe Belmonte, both linked to
Aliança pelo Brasil
, party that Bolsonaro tries to create.
Bolsonarista federal deputy Daniel Silveira, from the PSL (Social Liberal Party) of Rio de Janeiro, was also the subject of investigations investigating anti-democratic acts.
Later, the imprisonment of Silveira himself, in February of this year, in the framework of the investigation of
fake news
, triggered a new race for the massive deletion of videos, reveals Felitti.
Silveira recorded a video in which he claimed to imagine the court magistrate Luiz Edson Fachin "getting beaten up."
Diogo Rais ponders, however, that, although actions are being carried out, the self-consciousness of
fake news
does not occur at the same speed.
"We have no experience in the world that has solved the challenge of fake news," he says.
But the TSE's decision to suspend payments from the monetization of the publications of the far-right channels seems to work.
Because producing fake news is expensive.
And inhibiting its profitability is an attempt to undermine this business, although the root of the problem is in discovering the funders.
“It is expensive to make a
fake news
machine
.
It needs maintenance, administration, creation.
It is more expensive than doing an advertising campaign, for example, ”says Rais.
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