Producing Antipetismo : Media activism and the rise of the radical,nationalist right in contemporary Brazil

Introduction

When examining the decline of the leftist Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) and the ascension of the right-wing extremist Jair Bolsonaro of the far-right Partido Liberal Social (PSL) to the 2018 presidency, political scientists David Samuels and Cesar Zucco have argued that this shift is best understood not through positive characteristics of Bolsonaro’s candidacy but through antipetismo [‘anti-PT-ism’], an intensely personal resentment of the PT (Samuels and Zucco, 2018). Some observers of the 2018 election think that roughly half the vote was primarily against the PT, rather than being specifically for Bolsonaro (Winter, 2017). As an ideology, antipetismo grew out of a series of massive nationwide protests in 2013. These demonstrations were originally local and organic but increasingly national and largely fueled by social networking sites—specifically Facebook (Morais de Souza and Azeveda Sousa, 2014). In this early stage, the protests registered a wide variety of contentious demands towards the government, including lowering costs of public transportation, more transparency in public spending, and taking measures to curb law enforcement violence. The movement also began to add a nationalist note to focus on Brazilian domestic issues, as opposed to the spending by the PT for the World Cup and Olympics, which were seen by some in these changing movement declarations as evidence of too much internationalism (Mendonça, 2017). By 2015, public discontent within Brazil had been channeled into a direct call for the impeachment of PT president Dilma Rousseff (who was impeached in 2016); all other demands had withered. In 2018, the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro won the popular election on campaign largely dedicated to ‘cleaning up’ the disaster the PT caused (McCann, 2018), and echoing US President Trump’s nationalist focus on making Brazil, in this case, great again.

We assert that legacy media, popular right-wing Facebook groups, and networks formed around the communication network WhatsApp fueled antipetismo by channeling anger originating in the 2013 nationwide protests away from a variety of social, political, and issues and toward a villainous depiction of PT leaders and valorization of anti-PT activists like Bolsonaro, and his own conservative, nationalist agenda. To interrogate this assertion, we propose two specific lines of research. The first is a qualitative textual analysis of the ‘Vem Pra Rua’ (VPR) and ‘O Movimento Brasil Livre’ Facebook groups between 2014 and 2016. These groups shared key characteristics. Both adopted language taken directly from the 2013 protest: ‘Vem Pra Rua’ (‘Hit the Street’) was the central slogan of the 2013 protest; O Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL) was named after O Movimento Passe Livre (MPL), the organization that called the initial protest in 2013. Both of these two groups were also heavily active in providing an online space for promoting Rousseff’s impeachment. Through close reading of the materials distributed on these sites, we will illustrate how they channeled general unrest into a specifically partisan attack. The second set of cases will be an examination of the usage of Facebook and WhatsApp (a popular messaging service owned by Facebook, which is widespread in Brazil) by those campaigning for recently elected president Bolsonaro for a continued negative campaign against left candidates, specifically the PT, using fake news items like the supposed ‘gay kit’ that was being circulated in schools by the PT and others on the left to persuade children to become gay (FGV-DAPP, 2018). When possible, we will analyze examples of the materials that were circulated that have emerged in the press coverage and will examine the processes that were used to target and persuade people to forward the materials created for the campaign. We will briefly discuss ongoing research on the role of WhatsApp in Bolsanaro’s campaign (https://observa2018.com.br/en/). We hope to offer a generative critique through our careful look at how digital media can also be used by anti-democratic, ultra-nationalist forces like the antipetista movement.

Theorizing populist communication: The channeling of overdetermination

The first step toward understanding the mass mobilization of public rage against Rousseff, and the PT in general, must be to understand theoretically how the bifurcation of a polity into two opposed camps, the bureaucratic/administrative/elitist state and the grassroots/populist protest actors, is accomplished. This splitting is enabled by the practice of populist communication. As a theoretical construct, populist communication has generally been conceptualized as a communicative strategy based on the creation of a division between two opposed forces: the bureaucratic ‘state’ and the oppressed ‘people’ subject to the will of the state. For some scholars, this confrontation is artificially produced through rhetorical persuasive strategies generated by political strongmen aiming to win support to their cause. In this vein, Block and Negrine’s ‘The Populist Communication Style’, posits that one can connect British anti-immigrant politician Nigel Farage with Venezuelan socialist Hugo Chavez because both draw on the ‘adversarial, emotional, patriotic, and abrasive speech through which they connect with the discontented’ (2017: 182). From this perspective, populist communication is generated by political actors (often cast as demagogues) who seek to manipulate the basest levels of popular sentiment (xenophobia, racism, moral panics) for political or economic gain. In For a Left Populism (2018), Chantal Mouffe attempts to push the conceptual horizons of social movement organization and strategy attempts to add a material/empirical dimension to populism. She starts by stating that: ‘populism constructs a political frontier dividing society into two camps and calling for the mobilization of the “underdog” against “those in power”; it is not an ideology and cannot be attributed a specific programmatic content’ (Mouffe, 2018: 11). The second clause of this statement reflects a shift away from populism as a symbolic tool. This shift is reiterated at the book’s conclusion where she states: ‘the term “populism” is not an insult; it is a vessel for channeling a “collective will”’ (Mouffe, 2018: 71). Mouffe is arguing that instead of fomenting popular sentiment, populism captures it.

We argue that the right-wing media actors are acting not as tools wielded by conservative leaders (in this case Bolsonaro) but as a vessel encapsulating popular discontent originally generated in the 2013 nationwide demonstrations. Similar to the Occupy and Arab Spring protests, the Brazilian 2013 protests operated according to a fundamentally pre-figurative logic: often the political contentions or objectives of participants were not determined or coordinated at the onset of the series of marches. Instead, as Zeynep Tufecki (2017) argues, social media facilitated protests were marked by a variety of political orientations, objectives, and motives for participation along with a significantly lower degree of pre-existing coordination and a significantly rapider pace of growth in participants (2017: 90–102, 187). Digital media-facilitated protest movements often lack ideological or political cohesion and can morph quickly from one political orientation to another.

Following the work of Lima (2013), Mendonça (2017), and others, we forward the position that participants in the 2013 protests were not unified in their contentions which represented a plurality of political positions and socio-economic issues. In conceptual terms, these protests present a provocative case of what Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser calls overdetermination. Althusser argues that any political or economic revolution cannot be represented as clean break between two epochs. Instead, a contradiction between two social forces is always more complex than a simple Manichean dichotomy: ‘A contradiction is inseparable from its formal conditions of existence, and even from the instances it governs, it is radically affected by them, determining, but also determined in one and the same movement, and determined by the various levels and instances of the social formation it animates’ (Althusser, 1970 [1963]: 101, author’s italics). Without delving too deeply into the interpretation of this definition, the central element is that the contradiction is determined by a variety of levels (of power) and instances (of time and space) within a given formation. In the context of the 2013 demonstrations, the contradiction can be thought of as the conflict between the protestors and the state. The conflict itself was defined differently related to the demands of protestors. The variety of reasons animating the contradiction/conflict was mirrored by the socio-economic, gender, and ethnic diversity of the protestors.

Brazilian protest politics from the birth of Antipetismo to Bolsonaro’s ascendancy

The kind of vitriolic antipetismo that would fuel Dilma’s impeachment and Bolsonaro’s electoral victory was not merely the result of discursive interventions by right-wing activists. Alfred Saad-Filho situates the antipetismo that bubbled up during the 2013 protests as a combination of ‘external economic crises and internal legitimation crises reflecting a social malaise associated with neoliberalism’ (2013: 657). Similar to other nations that shifted to the left during the ‘Pink Tide’ period, Brazil had seen substantial economic growth combined with heightened spending on public programs during the period following the election of PT party founder Lula in 2002. The national economic situation worsened in the early 2010s as inflation levels rose as commodity prices fell, accompanied by media panics (Heredia, 2013); 2013 was the pinnacle of this inflationary period and perhaps best expressed in a New York Times piece dedicated to the ‘$30R cheese pizza’. All of these factors produced a volatile domestic situation.

Activists and researchers have also markedly critiqued the PT for either not addressing the crisis or making things worse. Long before the 2013 protests, many on the left critiqued the PT for failure to maintain active connections popular social movements like the Landless Workers’ Movement (Dangl, 2010) or privileging bureaucratization in furthering strategies for civic participation (Zibechi, 2014). However, the most common critique was that the PT was engaging in wanton public spending peppered with corrupt practices. A number of simmering spending issues had prompted public anger, including:

the commitment of public funds to launch mega-events like the 2014 World Cup without public discussion;

Though conservative groups would later try to paint PT corruption as the sole cause of the 2013 protests, this claim misses the protests’ overdetermined character. The first of the nationwide protests was launched by the MPL on May 16, 2013 in the city of Goiania in response to the first in a planned nationwide series of bus fare increases. The May 16 protest, which drew over 500 people and climaxed with the burning of two parked busses, received enormous coverage via mainstream media. A 6 June MPL protest in the business district of São Paulo drew 2,000 protestors accompanied by high levels of police violence captured and distributed through social media (Davis, 2016). As the protests continued in São Paulo, MPL activists in Rio de Janeiro coordinated with human rights activists and activists organizing to protest excessive government expenditures on mega-events like the World Cup and the Olympics (Landesman and Davis, 2018). While activists in Rio planned for a large demonstration on Avenida Getulio Vargas (the largest thoroughfare in the city) to coincide with the beginning of the Confederations Cup on 17 June, mainstream media networks began to feature stories villainizing the protests in São Paulo. However, after the 17 June Rio protest drew over 100,000 protestors (and two subsequent protests that week drew around 75,000 each), mainstream media coverage shifted. Condemnation of protests began to shift to celebration, as outlets emphasized two key elements: that people have good reason to protest, as wanton public spending and related corruption were hurting the country; and that the ‘best ways’ to protest, which included making sure to bring a Brazilian flag to show your pride (Saad-Filho, 2013). Here we can see a foreshadowing of the major components of VPR and the MBLs’ strategies: that protests should focus on PT corruption and that the act of protesting was about re-claiming national identity away from usurpers like Lula and Dilma.

The shift in focus of the demonstrations mirrored a class shift in national unrest. General grievances about costs of living and unsatisfactory government services were slowly overtaken by middle and upper middle-class grievances with the PT government, especially its involvement in corruption and concern about losses of key aspects of middle-class status. The established middle class resented the loss of some of their privileges as members of the new lower middle class began crowding malls, roads, and airports (Vieira, 2016). Furthermore, with the inflation of wages, it was harder and more expensive to hire household help. Though in isolation none of these individual factors provided the single catalyst for the widespread anti-PT protests, they combined to create a marked sense of middle/upper-middle class frustration (Winter, 2017).

The anti-PT (and then pro-Bolsonaro) movements were further fueled by the growth of new conservative socio-political forces. Perhaps the most prominent of these was the coalition known as Boi, Bala e Bíblia (Bulls, Bullets, and Bibles) that brought together a new right wing that united conservative agricultural interests from Brazil’s interior, a rapidly growing gun lobby that drew help and influence from the US NRA, and a quickly growing evangelical Protestant movement. This coalition also had power in congress, where a considerable evangelical bank of lawmakers contributed to Dilma’s impeachment, and within media industries, most notably with the second largest television network, TV Record. This network belonged to the most prominent evangelical church, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (IURD) (BIRMAN and LEHMANN, 1999).

Against the backdrop of this conservative shift within protests, we will analyze the combination of new and legacy media channels that facilitated first the impeachment of Dilma and then the candidacy of Bolsonaro.

Research questions

RQ1: How did right-wing activists affiliated with VPR and the MBL use social media (namely Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube) to channel the contentious language of the protests into a coherent anti-PT message?

We draw on a qualitative content analysis of social media posts (on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube) from 22 July 2018 (the day Bolsonaro announced his candidacy) until March 2019 (roughly 2 months into his presidency) to address how each group mobilized anti-PT sentiment in a way that benefited Bolsonaro’s candidacy. Our analysis will illustrate that while both of the groups consistently produced aggressively viscous attacks on the PT and its leadership, their positions regarding Bolsonaro are not identical. Specifically, VPR rarely published any social media posts related to Bolsonaro (two Instagram/Facebook posts in the period in question). The MBL, on the other hand, produced 10 YouTube videos and 30 Facebook/Instagram posts in favor of Bolsonaro. Building on these findings we argue that VPR acts as a vehicle to contain popular unrest while the MBL engages in a form of populist post-truth communication that attempts to situate the PT as depraved and criminally dangerous while presenting Bolsonaro as an intellectual on the level of Milton Friedman and a nationalist icon on the level of Steve Bannon.

RQ2: How did the support of both legacy media networks and new social media technologies discredit the PT and fuel Bolsonaro’s popularization in anticipation of the 2018 elections?

A number of media commentaries and academic papers have noted the role of TV Globo, major legacy newspapers like O Globo and O Estado de São Paulo, and news magazines like Veja in discrediting the PT. However not all of these media became pro-Bolsonaro. In fact, some of the main outlets, like TV Globo, opposed him and rival TV stations, like TV Record, supported him. Both media campaigns, by TV Record and regional media, and the final WhatsApp campaign that seemed to cement Bolsonaro’s election were related to a large movement for both discrediting the PT and supporting Bolsonaro, structured by the Boi, Bala, and Bíblia alliance (Mazieiro, 2019). Within this alliance, the role of evangelicals in both discrediting PT and supporting Bolsonaro was notable. However, the evangelical bloc was not completely uniform. For example, TV Record and the IURD were especially active against PT but came to support Bolsonaro somewhat late in his campaign. Finally, major elements of big business in Brazil came to support Bolsonaro and seem to have been particularly involved in financing and organizing the WhatsApp campaign that seems to have been crucial in actually electing Bolsonaro (Nalon, 2018). We will examine some of the key things that were circulated via WhatsApp that seem to have had the most impact and examine some of the main points of how the campaign was conducted.

VPR and the social media production of Antipetismo 2018–2019

When attempting to differentiate between the ways that VPR and the MBL craft and disseminate anti-PT social media messages questions of group history and organizational structure are key. Taking its name (‘Vem Pra Rua’ or ‘Come to the Street’) from the central slogan of the 2013 protest, VPR began as and continues to act as a Facebook and Instagram-based platform for organizing anti-corruption protests. Launched in 2013 by entrepreneur Rogerio Chequer and allies (Jimenez, 2015), VPR’s social media-enabled campaign launched in São Paulo in September. Interviews with Chequer present the anti-PT protests as an avenue for the ‘middle classes to reclaim what has been taken from them’. As a loosely woven together network of activists in São Paulo launched in 2014, VPR began through the planning of technological entrepreneurs and municipal politicians in that region. In the first post on its Facebook page, the group posted this call to action: ‘Come to the streets to express your outrage with us. Our flag is democracy, ethics in politics and an efficient and less swollen State’.

The major point of analysis here will be how in the 2018–2019 period VPR utilized social media to amplify anti-PT calls for Lula’s imprisonment and reflect on Bolsonaro’s candidacy. Analyzing VPR’s Facebook and Instagram output, we can see a consistent anti-PT message. However, the group also attacked individuals perceived as ‘corrupt’ from across the political spectrum: VPR published memes and videos on social media that attacked both Lula and candidates from within the acting Temer administration and Bolsonaro’s team. The organization created and circulated four central hashtags at the time: #PTnão, #LulaNuncaMais, #TchauQueridas, and #ToComMoro. With the exception of a handful of outliers, these four hashtags dominated the site during this time. The first two are explicitly anti-PT. #PTnão translates to ‘PT NO’. This hashtag is a re-articulation of #elenão, an earlier hashtag utilized by feminist activists to express disapproval of Bolsonaro’s extreme misogyny (Pontin, 2018). Utilizing what Zappavigna (2011) calls the ‘contextual malleability’ of hashtags and other native elements of social media (Zappavigna, 2011), this hashtag builds off the viewers’ knowledge of the ‘não’ within hashtags. The second, #LulaNuncaMais, literally translates to ‘Lula Never Again’. This hashtag is always accompanied by a picture of the mugshot taken of Lula the first time he was arrested in 2016. This meme reuses a meme from the popular campaigns in the 1980s against the military dictatorship, particularly its use of torture—‘Nunca Mais’ (Arns, 1985)—to indicate that Lula and the PT were in a way as unacceptable to Brazilians as the former military regime. #TchauQueridas translates to ‘Goodbye Dears’ (querida being the feminine form of the translation for love and/or intimate friendship). Used ironically, this hashtag accompanied 41 images of PT politicians accused during this period as part of the continuing judicial extension of Operation Car Wash. Finally, #ToComMoro, the most frequently occurring, translates to ‘I’m with Moro’. ‘Moro’ is a reference to Sergio Moro, the federal judge who oversaw Operation Car Wash, the figure leading the anti-PT corruption purge.

The only two items appearing on VPR’s social media during the period under discussion that directly addressed Bolsonaro were posts shared on 18 November (the day after the election) and 01 January 2019 (two days after the inauguration). The first post simply shows a picture of Bolsonaro with the caption ‘Bolsonaro was elected president today’. The second post is more illustrative of VPR’s ambiguous or couched support of Bolsonaro’s presidency. The post features an official photograph of Bolsonaro and wife during the inauguration. In Portuguese, it reads ‘O VPR deseja que Jair Bolsonaro faça um bom governo e honre os milhões de votos recibidos. Boa sorte, presidente’. This translates to ‘VPR hopes (or wishes, depending on interpretation of translation) that Jair Bolsonaro creates a good government and honors the millions of votes received’. The post has a single hashtag: #PosseBolsonaro. The term ‘posse’ in this context translates to ‘induction’, literally meaning ‘Bolsonaro’s induction ceremony’. While certainly not critical of Bolsonaro it does not indulge in any of the panegyrics about Bolsonaro circulated by the MBL.

Our analysis finds that VPR worked amplify anti-corruption sentiment against the PT during the 2018 election period. Specifically, the group’s social media output registers a clear wish for Lula, Dilma, and their cadre to be punished to the furthest extent possible within the law. However, and crucially, VPR never presented itself as explicitly supportive of Bolsonaro or any other political party. When confronted about the group’s political affiliation in a February 2019 interview with O Folha de São Paulo, national coordinator Adelaide Oliveira maintained a non-partisan stance: ‘We are legalistic. I cannot blame a person who has not been investigated. We only get organized to protest when corruption is investigated or officially denounced’ (Tavares, 2019). While VPR’s position here verges on a kind of disenchanted and anti-political nihilism, it does not actively support one group against others. Faced with a range of problems and raising a large number of contentions from the 2013 protests, the Brazilian citizenry (in particular the middle and upper–middle classes) turned to the site as a means of reinforcing the message that corruption was the only problem with the economic and political problems experienced since the early 2010s.

MBL: The radical cadre of Antipetismo and the production of Bolsonaro as ‘Outsider’

Though rarely commented upon by international journalists or academics, it is crucial to ground the MBL’s rise in the political education its leaders received at institutes and research centers funded by right-wing activists in the United States. Kim Kataguiri, the leader of MBL, was actively working with the Koch Foundation-funded Atlas Network while a college student through a program called Estudantes Para Liberdade (EPL) (Students for Liberty) (Atlas Network, 2015). Building off of the long-standing Koch interest in building ideological movements, EPL (and subsequently MBL) focused on creating a cultural identity around conservatism. As political scientist Nancy MacLean argues, the Koch’s approach to developing disciplined activists dates back to the publication of Murray Rothbard’s ‘Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change’: ‘We came to realize that, as the Marxist groups discovered in the past, a cadre with no organization and with no continuous program of reinforcement is bound to defect and melt away …’ (quoted in MacLean, 2017: 141). Kataguiri and the MBL took this strategy to heart, creating not just an anti-corruption critique centered on the PT but also a ‘brand focused on reasserting liberty and economic freedom’ (Atlas Network, 2015). For them, Bolsonaro provided a key figure for solidifying this new kind of Brazilian conservatism.

During the 2018–2019 period under discussion (and unlike VPR), MBL invested more energy in producing materials for YouTube than other social networking sites (SNSs). In attempting to create a populist narrative around Bolsonaro’s position as an alternative to the elitist bureaucracy of the PT, MBL consistently engaged in ‘post-truth communication’ in the vein of Waisbord’s theorization by re-casting coverage of current events in a way that is deracinated from general norms of news coverage (Waisbord, 2018). Within the period under discussion, two specific types of videos in particular show the shift within MBL to ‘post-truth communication’ in a way that actively builds a protagonistic narrative around Bolsonaro. The first form of post-truth communication is the mythologizing around Bolsonaro as an anti-corruption activist and radical economic reformer. In the period under analysis, 25 videos discuss Bolsonaro’s economic activity, documenting his lack of corruption while celebrating his economic commitment to free markets. An illustrative example of this lionizing treatment comes in a sprawling video posted on 22 January 2019 and narrated by Renan Santos, the group’s executive producer for digital content. This video, entitled ‘Bolsonaro in Davos, Pension Reform, and Steve Bannon’, weaves a narrative that links Bolsonaro’s support of foreign direct investment in Brazil during the World Economic Forum, his re-formatting of the ‘corrupt’ pension system in a way that would ‘make Milton Friedman smile’, and his links to Steve Bannon. The argument is that Bolsonaro combines the economic neoliberalism of Friedman with the defense of national culture reminiscent of Banon. The video ends with a statement that Bolsonaro’s combination of the Chicago School of free market economics and the national pride promoted by Bannon would produce ‘a film that would be too much for us’ (‘uma cinema pra caramba’).

The second set of videos focus on public security. In particular, they attack perceived enemies on the left as either ‘spoiled college brats’ or leftist terrorists. The first version of these anti-left videos features Kataguiri and others from MBL providing superior logical responses to campus activists. In a style similar to American conservative activists like Ben Shapiro, videos like ‘Militants of the PSOL attack Kim Kataguiri and he takes the high road’ (20 September 2018; 2.3 million views) illustrate the tactic of belittling and delegitimizing leftists. The other type of video warns the public to the ‘dangers’ posed by the so-called ‘terrorist left’. These videos cast those associated with the PT and left-wing social movements and activists (including the widely loved Rio de Janeiro councilwoman Marielle Franco who was murdered in March 2018 by militia members with connections to Bolsonaro’s family) represented a terrorist threat to Brazilian democracy. In one video called ‘MBL’s Official Pronouncement Regarding Bolsonaro’s Attack’ (7 September 2018), published after Bolsonaro was stabbed on the campaign trail, Santos claims that Bolsonaro is the only person who can protect Brazil from ‘rabid communists’ who are trying to destroy the foundations of human and property rights in Brazil.

The series of videos casting leftists, human rights advocates, and school teachers as terrorists and the neo-fascist Bolsonaro as visionary crystallizes the overall strategy of MBL’s social media activity: to, in the words of Waisbord (2018), create ‘bullshit’. According to Waisbord, the liar ‘knows the truth and carefully tries to take attention away from it by distorting facts, parsing words, and other shrewd tactics’ (Waisbord, 2018: 13). To tell a lie implies that the speaker can differentiate between truth and falsehood and is actively choosing to not tell the truth. The bullshitter, on the other hand, does not care whether the information disseminated is true or false: ‘Facts really do not matter to him. He haphazardly selects and invents facts that might suit him in a specific moment only to forget and ignore them later. He is not terribly interested in maintaining consistent lies, but rather recklessly makes statements based on skin-deep evidence, hearsay, and tabloid tidbits. Bullshitters talk about anything with superficial or no knowledge because ultimately it does not matter’ (Waisbord, 2018: 13). Though Waisbord is here referring to President Trump, the description aptly captures the MBL’s approach: launching dubiously true accusations at political opponents in a haphazard fashion while lacking consideration for consistency in positions or avoiding self-contradiction.

While VPR reflects a conservative consolidation of the demands of the 2013 protests into a consistent anti-PT message, the MBL accomplishes something much more powerful: it decouples ideology from both history and empirical reality. From the MBL’s perspective, Brazilian democracy is under attack from threatening figures like Marielle Franco (herself murdered for building a political base in Rio’s poorest neighborhoods), high school teachers, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer (LGBTQ) community, and other marginalized groups. According to the MBL, Bolsonaro, whose littered record includes controversies ranging from praising torture and executions during the military dictatorship as effective governance tools to claiming that women often try to become pregnant to leach money out of the country’s social security system (Lima, 2013), will protect the Brazilian population from these rising threats.

The role of WhatsApp and legacy media in bolstering Bolsonaro’s ascendancy

Somewhat like the election of Trump in 2016, in the campaigns to first discredit the PT and then elect a candidate of the right, both legacy media, particularly television, and new media, particularly Facebook, as noted above, and WhatsApp, all ended up being crucial. The legacy media, print, radio, and television were particularly important in the initial phase of discrediting the PT, and the specifically evangelical broadcast media and the messaging and social media like WhatsApp were particularly crucial in then electing Bolsonaro. An analysis of the online pages given to anti-PT coverage showed that the largest number of came from legacy print media and a news portal, Portal R7, ‘VEJA, Folha de S.Paulo, O Globo, Exame, Época e Portal R7 …’ (Penteado and Lerner, 2018).

The impact of legacy media, evangelical media, and TV record

A crucial early build up was the growth of evangelical media, first on radio and then US-style televangelism, leading to a powerful block of evangelical media. In overall political impact, it might be comparable to the crucial early build-up of Fox News in the US to later help with the nomination and election of Trump. After learning televangelism from US churches in Brazil, Edir Macedo, founder of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (IURD), succeeded in buying the package of television licenses that composed TV Record, an established network that went back to the 1950s (Reis, 2006). TV Record carries quite a bit of conventional programming, including telenovelas, but it frequently inserts a religious edge (its most popular telenovela was about Moses and the 10 commandments) and can make its news more political, depending on the era.

Evangelical use of electronic media has grown steadily along with Pentecostal and US-style evangelical churches’ influence in Brazil, modeling their use of radio and television (Campos, 2008). The fullest expression of that tendency has been the IURD and TV Record, but many other groups have joined in. Evangelical media and its power have also grown with evangelical political power in the Congress. There has been an Evangelical Parliamentary Front, also called the Evangelical Bench (or banca in Portuguese) since 2003, which represents a variety of evangelicals but is dominated by the Assemblies of God and the IURD (Mosca Pinezi, 2019). The churches serve as an interpersonal mobilization point, using both face-to-face and the WhatsApp messaging program, and as point of media power, using radio, online media, and television to broadcast both religious and political messages. The media power has been reinforced over time as more evangelical congressional representatives have been elected, since legislators have often been offered broadcast frequencies as a way to get their votes on major issues, starting with President Sarney in the 1980s, who gave away hundreds of station licenses to get a fifth year of presidential mandate (Dos Santos and Capparelli, 2004).

Many of the evangelical media tended to be critical of the PT, even though many poor evangelicals, particularly in the relatively more impoverished North and Northeast, tended to vote for PT candidates. While PT policies in the 2000s helped boost many poor and working class people further up the economic ladder and radically diminished hunger and extreme poverty, many evangelicals were suspicious of PT support for social policies that included more support for abortion rights, gay rights and more regulation of markets (Romancini, 2018). So evangelical media were a major part of the broad coalition that pushed antipetismo, particularly as evangelical churches and their media began to feel that it was safer to criticize Lula and the PT to their poorer constituents who has supported the PTs anti-poverty programs.

In terms of the impact on the election of Bolsonaro itself, there was support from a variety of evangelical media, including individual and groups of churches using their WhatsApp networks to deliver anti-PT and pro-Bolsonaro messages, as well as issue messages about abortion, gays rights, etc. that favored supporting Bolsonaro over the PT candidate. However, the most visible impact was Bishop Edir Macedo’s (owner of Tv Record and leader of the largest evangelical church, UCKD) decision to endorse Bolsonaro. That seems to have had a considerable impact:

Days after Macedo voiced his support, Record scored an exclusive interview with Bolsonaro. It then proceeded to air it during Globo’s presidential debate, which Bolsonaro didn’t attend, despite being the front-runner. The power move gutted Globo’s ratings that night. Macedo’s media conglomerate quickly shifted coverage, featuring mainly stories that flattered Bolsonaro; Paulo Zocchi, the president of Sao Paulo’s journalist union, said he received complaints from Record employees who said they were pressured to favor the candidate before the election. (Biller and Watson 2018)

The role of WhatsApp

An estimated 66% of Brazilians use the Internet and an estimated 53% use Facebook (Internet World Stats, 2019). A very similar percentage uses WhatsApp (around 66%), but since it is essentially free for most users, available for little or no extra charge on most regular and smart phones, people use it a lot more, often multiple times per day. From rich to poor, most Brazilians had come to make multiple uses of WhatsApp every day. People had become used to using it for group communication for every kind of purpose from book-clubs, families, hobby groups, etc. to churches and political parties. (The second author interviewed a couple of pastors who were participating in a graduate seminar about their use of WhatsApp in their organizations in 2017. They used it for almost every kind of communication and mobilization of people to do a variety of tasks.)

WhatsApp enables people to send text messages, videos, songs, etc. to a circle of friends that was limited to 20 at the time of the Brazilian election (Haynes and Boadle 2018). Signaling that he know how effective his WhatsApp campaign had been, Bolsonaro asked Facebook to raise the limit so that people could send messages to hundreds of contacts, while the PT asked for it to be lowered to five (Haynes and Boadle, 2018). Another key characteristic of WhatsApp is that it is solidly encrypted, which makes it almost impossible for anyone outside a given group to see what is being circulated inside. Over the last five years, several judges had blocked WhatsApp across Brazil, because the power of its encryption made it impossible for law enforcement or judges to see messages by drug traffickers (Mota Resende, 2018).

Brazil’s electoral law allocates free television political advertising time by party size, so the PT had a large block of time on all the television stations that all stations are required to broadcast (Albuquerque, Steibel et al., 2008). The PT felt comfortable relying on that in their election strategy, not suspecting the coming impact of WhatsApp. In contrast, Bolsonaro’s party in congress was insignificant when the time blocks were calculated, so he had very little TV time, and had to rely on new media, Facebook and particularly WhatsApp.

Quite a wide variety of information and misinformation was being circulated over WhatsApp by groups on the right. Research by David Nemer reported by The Guardian noted that a sample of pro-Bolsonaro WhatsApp groups had many ordinary Brazilians who did not trust the mainstream media, see WhatsApp groups as safe spaces to learn about politics, and share life experiences about why they were voting for Bolsonaro. However, the groups also had Bolsonaro loyalists entrusted with steering conversations, and influencers who were most often the ones who introduced fake news (Nemer, 2018).

To get a sense of what kinds of misinformation were circulated on WhatsApp during Brazil’s election season, Aos Fatos, the fact-checking organization that I lead, crowdsourced from over 6,000 WhatsApp users more than 700 false or misleading posts being shared on the app … These messages were largely aimed at right-leaning political groups, Catholic and evangelical churches, trade and business associations, and military groups. There were widespread false reports, for example, of how the Venezuelan government hacked Brazil’s electronic voting system and of how Bolsonaro’s rival, Haddad, handed out baby bottles with penis-shaped tops at schools to combat homophobia. (Nalon, 2018)

Conclusion

Concerning media, we found that both legacy media and digital media, in conjunction with widespread street demonstrations, contributed first to the anti-PT campaigns that delegitimized the PT and legitimated ousting at PT president, and then later to the election of an extreme right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro. We found that while a variety of media helped discredit the PT, evangelical media, particularly the second largest TV network, TV Record, were particularly central to electing Bolsonaro, along with a remarkably effective, essentially hidden campaign on the encrypted message service WhatsApp, in addition to a somewhat more open campaign on Facebook. WhatsApp was particularly central to a fake news campaign that broke several Brazilian campaign laws, while being remarkably effective.

In A Luta Contra O Corrupção (2017), Deltan Dallagnol (the federal attorney who spearheaded Lava Jato) argues that the 2015–2016 anti-corruption protests rekindled a public sense of morality lost during the decade and a half of PT rule: ‘The first public rallies for the impeachment had a different tone. The crowds were no longer just pushing for something political; they were now pushing for justice’ (Dallaganol, 2016: 255). Within a post-truth populist framework, ‘justice’ replaces ‘politics’ as right-wing activists claim an existential morality to their work. From this perspective, there is no room to question motives or larger agendas behind them. This leaves us with the question: How can we fight against to ensure this situation? We propose two elements: media reform and consolidation of left philanthropy.

From the perspective of media regulation, scholars including Waisbord (2000) and Carolina Matos (2008) have argued that the history of journalism in Brazil since the dictatorship period has been marked by high levels of conglomeration, the influence of editorial politics, and large macro-level relationships between publisher and politicians/political parties. Furthermore, journalists feel the financial pressure of ‘having to simplify political debates and lower standards in response to market demands’ (Matos, 2008: 249). This commercial news model needs to be countered by popular alternative media aimed at fighting against the fascist order promoted by MBL and (less directly) VPR. While some projects arose during the 2013 protests with this goal in mind (namely MídiaNINJA), their work diminished as they faced excessive attacks from mainstream media for being ‘shills’ for the PT (Landesman and Davis, 2018).

This leads to the final point. Both groups, but especially MBL, proliferated due to financial and logistical support from right-wing philanthropists and activists (including many in the US). If media projects aimed at empowering marginalized communities and combatting what Alexander Reid Ross calls ‘the fascist creep’ (2017), organization and fundraising have to be priorities. Recognizing that both of the projects under discussion are neither autochthonous nor organic should serve as a call that the Left needs to engage in serious conversations about networking, fundraising, and scaling up in Brazil and beyond.