An Alert to the World: The Role of Social Media Platforms in Bolsonaro’s Disinformation Campaign Targeting Brazil’s Democratic Institutions

In recent months, social media companies—most notably Meta and X—have significantly relaxed their posture when it comes to addressing mis- and disinformation. For instance, in January, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised the company would return to its “roots around free expression,” cutting fact-checkers, reducing the thresholds on its automated filters, and adjusting its hate speech policy to be more permissive.

These moves seem especially incongruent in Brazil, where the country’s former President is accused of orchestrating a coup attempt to overturn the 2022 election results. On February 18, Brazil’s Attorney General formally charged former President Jair Bolsonaro and his associates, alleging they engaged in plots to annul the vote, disband courts, and even assassinate the President-elect. The evidence presented details a coordinated effort involving the manipulation of state resources and the incitement of violence against democratic institutions. The investigation also reveals how political figures, influencers, and media networks used Big Tech platforms to spread disinformation through coordinated narratives falsely suggesting electoral fraud.

Although this case is specific to Brazil, it serves as a warning sign about the broader consequences of platform decisions. As platforms loosen their policies, embark on a bromance with US President Donald Trump, create alliances with right-wing parties worldwide to resist regulation, and frame their stance on freedom of expression as a battle against “censorship,” they risk amplifying disinformation campaigns, threatening electoral systems, challenging institutions, and undermining democracy and sovereignty.

The reports from Brazil’s investigation demonstrate how disinformation operations leverage conspiracy theory narratives, relying on large-scale coordination of authentic users to spread hypothetical data, flawed evidence, false information, and deceptive storytelling through a multimedia system. This type of campaign effectively evades both manual and algorithmic content moderation systems, which struggle to interpret communicative nuances. The nature of Bolsonaro’s disinformation campaigns surpasses what existing systems and algorithms can detect and certainly what they would regard as violative. Their propagation of these false narratives relies on groups in messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram, official presidential livestreams on YouTube, posts from right-wing politicians and influencers, and traditional right-wing media. Through their official YouTube channels, these media outlets provided broadcasting time for right-wing politicians to disseminate conspiracy theories.

Long before Trump, Big Tech companies were already paving the way for democratic backsliding under the banner of free speech advocacy. While platforms lobby against regulation by making alliances with right-wing parties, they have also made significant internal changes impacting elections. In 2022, Elon Musk dismantled content moderation policies and teams at Twitter (now X). In 2023, YouTube stopped removing content related to false claims of electoral fraud globally by defending that “controversial or based on disproven assumptions, is core to a functioning democratic society — especially in the midst of election season” (YouTube’s election integrity measures have remained in place since the second round of presidential elections in 2022). Finally, in 2025, Mark Zuckerberg also jumped on the free speech bandwagon.

While platforms have long advocated for free expression in their terms—a battle that ultimately benefits their own business interests—in the past years, with a lot of public pressure, they have implemented measures to mitigate threats to electoral integrity. For example, Meta and YouTube have rules against coordinated inauthentic behavior, voter interference tactics, and content that promotes harm or hate—policies that can be enforced during elections. Certainly, these policies are necessary, but they are far from sufficient. Fundamentally, this does not mean platforms have ever truly safeguarded civic integrity.

The Brazilian experience demonstrates how disinformation goes beyond the right to question the integrity of the electoral system—which, of course, is important to defend. It shows that the issues are not merely coordinated inauthentic behavior or algorithmic manipulation on a single platform. Instead, modern disinformation campaigns operate across multiple platforms and media formats and are deeply intertwined with the broader political landscape—something these companies consistently fail to understand. This failure, however, is not due to naïveté. Rather, it reflects a deliberate strategic choice driven by financial and political interests that directly impact democracy and sovereignty.

As platforms “fight to “restore free expression,” we in Brazil are well aware of the threats they pose to our democracy. Brazil’s Attorney General findings should not come as a surprise. For years, Brazilians trusted the electronic voting system. However, after Bolsonaro’s rise to power in 2018, conspiratory narratives became more prominent on social media platforms. In November 2022, 56% of Brazilians did not trust the electronic voting machines. Coordinated, multi-media-driven conspiracy theories became the tool to success for political actors in Brazil, used to resist regime change, undermine democratic institutions, legitimize false narratives, and create widespread cognitive dissonance.

The Brazilian Supreme Court has yet to decide the next steps of this trial. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg’s policy announcements earlier this year will undoubtedly have ripple effects across the industry and around the globe. As in Brazil we brace ourselves for another presidential election in 2026, we are not alone. The threats to democracy and sovereignty are a worldwide reality, and the evidence brought to light in this investigation should be a warning sign.

For years, legislators, regulators, civil society groups, researchers, journalists, and even tech employees—who, in an act of resistance, have challenged the demands from their employers—have played a fundamental role in pressuring platforms to act on disinformation and conspiracy theories that threaten our electoral system. This time, the challenge is even greater— we need to find a creative pathway for international alliances to safeguard democracy at a global level.