A version of this article originally appeared on VICE Brazil.For a moment, imagine you’re living in Brazil. In the past week or so, it’s highly possible that you or one of your friends has found themselves, upon checking your social media, bombarded by articles, videos and memes meant to spread lies and rumors, some of which border on utterly absurd. The deluge of political fluff has been directly linked with Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right authoritarian presidential candidate who seems poised to clinch the presidency this weekend, and his followers.
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(After the original publication of this story on VICE Brazil on October 11, Bolsonaro’s business backers were accused of financing a multimillion-dollar illegal fake news campaign over WhatsApp by flooding the platform’s users with messages undermining his rival, the left-wing candidate Fernando Haddad).The strategy at play here—a massive injection of often-made-up content into an already noisy media environment—has been called "firehosing." The practice, described in the RAND Corporation’s 2016 publication The Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model, describes the propaganda model deployed by the Russian government in the 2016 US presidential election. The report says it is characterized by two distinctive features: a multichannel messaging approach and a willingness to disseminate information that is taken out of context, only true in part, or plainly fallacious. Put simply: the lies flow quickly and voraciously around the globe.“The new elements here are the speed and volume of fake news, that’s why comparisons to firehoses are being made,” says Luiz Yassuda, director of the São Paulo-based digital communication agency Alma Beta and producer for the podcasts Braincast and Mupoca. “[Firehoses] have a fast, strong flow that’s hard to avoid.”Fake stories have spread about all candidates in the Brazilian election, but Bolsonaro and his supporters have used and distributed falsehoods, lies, and misrepresentations as a core campaign strategy. After winning the first round of elections on Sunday October 7, Bolsonaro went live on Facebook, ignoring the press while questioning the accuracy of Brazil’s electronic voting system (the claim was quickly debunked by the country’s Superior Electoral Court). At the end of August, his party, the PSL (Social Liberal Party), made an account on Gab, a US-based alt-right social media platform known for fostering fake news.
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The biggest development in the firehosing strategy has come on WhatsApp: Bolsonaro's base has weaponized the app's groups feature, where the spread of fake news is hard to trace and harder to stop, to spread rumors meant to damage Haddad’s reputation. One such rumor falsely accused the the left-wing candidate of providing daycare centers with “mamadeiras eróticas,” (erotic baby bottles) with penis-shaped nozzles to combat homophobia; another, fueled by Bolsonaro himself, alleged that Haddad had administered “gay kits” to indoctrinate youth into a gay lifestyle in the classroom during his term as Mayor of São Paulo. In reality, the so-called “kits” were proposed learning materials teachers could use to teach their students about safe sex, sexual diversity and tolerance as part of a federal “Escola sem homofobia” (“Schools Without Homophobia”) initiative. The material was never actually introduced in the classroom after conservatives complained about it.And although the PSL has garnered notoriety for disseminating fake news, the opposing party—the left-wing Workers’ Party, whose candidate Haddad will face Bolsonaro in the runoff elections on October 28—has also slipped on the matter, albeit not as egregiously. Voters notice this, according to Yassuda, and the result can be a blanket dismissal of any critical coverage of their preferred candidate. “People quickly start to refer to anything that comes out against that certain candidate as ‘fake news,'" Yassuda says. "It might be a sign that these days truth and facts are simply viewed as [conflicting] versions of what’s being told. Either way, political parties aside, [fake news] influences elections.”
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