Tics, fake news and the weak hearts of Lula and Bolsonaro’s social media gurus

It is on social media that the fate of the next government of the world’s eighth-largest economy is being decided. Brazil goes to the polls tomorrow for the presidential run-off; the leading polling organisations predict that the result will be decided by a tiny percentage of the vote, less than the margin of error. And amidst the fog of uncertainty, the political battle between the two candidates is to win, through a digital propaganda war, the handful of votes needed to secure a definitive victory.

Flávio Bolsonaro, the new Trump-style Brazilian far-right figure and son of former president Jair – who was sentenced to 27 years in prison for an attempted coup and is now under house arrest on humanitarian grounds – emerged from the first round with a lead of 2.2 million votes over President Lula da Silva, the 80-year-old icon of the Latin American left and founder of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT). When the left realised just how foolish it had been to leave online propaganda in the hands of the right, when the PT realised that it would be suicidal to abandon the field of social media propaganda in a young country with a very low average level of education and where people are constantly on their mobile phones (two out of three Brazilians get their news solely through social media, as sociological studies have been explaining in vain for at least a decade), Lula ordered his supporters to fight the opponent with their own weapons.

The right wing dominates the online electoral landscape. Bolsonaro entrusts his entire electoral strategy to his social media guru, Nikolas Ferreira, a thirty-year-old from the state of Minas Gerais, who, as a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies, secured over 3.1 million votes. He is the most voted-for MP in Brazil’s history.

Lula, who ignores social media and does not own a smartphone, decided after the first-round result came in to first make a couple of videos lasting a couple of minutes, which he broadcasts from the iPhone of his second wife, Janja, a sociologist and PT activist for thirty years. He then sacked all the new arrivals whom the First Lady had slipped into the campaign leadership. Finally, he threw himself headlong into social media campaigning, placing himself in the hands of a tech-savvy thirty-year-old MP from Minas Gerais, André Janones, and a newly elected twenty-two-year-old Black TikToker, Ana Eloisa. He entrusted them with the final electoral battle of his long political life.

The first hiccup occurred immediately after the televised face-to-face between the two candidates, when Janones suffered a suspected heart attack and observers were about to write him off. However, news soon arrived from the intensive care unit at São Paulo Hospital: there had been no heart attack, only a serious cardiac arrhythmia that had been overcome—he is back in the running. Janones is an unlikely figure alongside Lula. The PT had never paid him any attention until now, despite his fame having already exploded online during the lorry drivers’ strike in 2018. Now, entrusted with the mission of blocking the Bolsonaro clan’s return to power, he has set up the WhatsApp account ‘Lula’s Army’, with 5 million subscribers. He administers it using military jargon and bombards subscribers with messages such as: “Soldiers, follow me; in the next ten minutes I want 50 million ‘#FlávioCorrupt’ hashtags.” He is highly divisive on the left because he disseminates fake news—perhaps less blatant than that of the right, but still falsehoods nonetheless. However, the story about the ‘mamadeira de piroca’ used by Jair Bolsonaro in the 2018 campaign remains unrivalled: the viral video of a man holding a phallic-shaped baby bottle claimed it was the new bottle distributed in state nurseries by the PT alongside a ‘gay kit’ to eradicate homophobia from early childhood.

Jannones does not go that far, but he does advocate the use of fake news. He says: “Enough talk – right now, an online campaign is more useful to us than the truth.” Having been discharged from intensive care, he went on a rampage: “Soldier, are you there? Now is the time to give up lunch, dinner and even flirting if necessary. It’s time to have just one thing on your mind: re-electing this man, re-electing Lula. Get ready in front of your screen, keep your finger ready on the ‘X’ button now and go! Right now! I want three hashtags all at once.”

Peremptory orders are interspersed with intimate backstage messages: “Hey, President Lula’s just called me to come and see him straight away. I’m driving to São Paulo. I only travel by car because that way I can stay connected at all times, not even for a second. If I were travelling by plane, I wouldn’t be able to.” He then adds: “Hey, soldier, is it up to Lula to put his campaign commitments on hold to sit at the computer and send messages? No, that’s your job. Go on, use this hashtag!” The conversation concludes with simple messages designed to go viral in a matter of seconds.

The judges have become involved in the social media campaign, as they have in everything else in Brazil. Every day, the two candidates ask the Supreme Electoral Court – an independent body comprising some of the same judges as the Supreme Court – to remove their opponent’s videos from the internet. There are hundreds of appeals a day.