In the months leading up to the country’s presidential election in October — in which, in a close runoff, Lula da Silva from the leftist Worker’s Party defeated the right-wing incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro — social networks were flooded with disinformation, calls in Portuguese to “Stop the Steal” and Bolsonaro’s insistence that the elections would be rigged. 

On January 8, a week after Lula began his third term as Brazil’s president, followers of Bolsonaro took the country’s capital by storm. Frustrated right-wing radicals armed with weapons, flags, mobile phones and conspiracy theories occupied and destroyed the three pillars of the federal government in Brasília: the Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace. They not only left a trail of destruction but also stole documents and hard drives, and destroyed artworks and infrastructure. 

“There was no surprise at all, they [right-wing radicals] followed the extreme-right playbook, step by step. They are just pawns in a bigger game,” said researcher Michele Prado, an independent analyst who studies digital movements and the Brazilian far-right. According to Prado, people who stormed the capital were “domestic terrorists” moved by conspiracy theories that reject liberal democracy and its institutions. The researcher added that the group views violence as a legitimate response to what it wrongly perceives as a fraudulent election. Prado also called attention to how people were proud to take part in the invasion, boasting of their presence on social media and inviting others to join. “It raises their in-group status,” she said. “The more they perform on social media, the higher their ‘score’ before their peers, the more radicalized they become.”

Bolsonaro has always welcomed and incentivized radicalization. His so-called “Office of Hate” — a pro-Bolsonaro online apparatus known for attacking government opponents and journalists — and his supporters have a long record of spreading hate speech, fake news and disinformation online. But since he lost his re-election bid in a highly-anticipated runoff vote, tensions and accusations have taken on a tone of all-out denialism. This narrative has dominated B-38, a pro-Bolsonaro Telegram channel with military roots and more than 60,000 members. On the night Bolsonaro lost the runoff, before the results were even announced, a member of B-38 claimed that the Brazil Supreme Court's vote-counting "algorithm" — no such thing exists — was stealing votes from Bolsonaro and giving them to Lula. An avalanche of baseless rumors about election fraud followed.

Refusing to accept defeat, Bolsonaro supporters blocked roads and camped out in front of the quarters of the Brazilian Armed Forces, calling for a military intervention. All of these efforts were orchestrated online. By the end of November, paid ads on Facebook and Instagram called for a military coup, spreading misinformation and disinformation about the elections. Despite this going against Meta's content policies, Agência Pública, a Brazilian investigative journalism outlet, found that the ads were viewed more than 400,000 times. In December, lawmakers aligned with Bolsonaro began taking to the floor of Brazil’s Congress to call for a military coup and generate online engagement. These calls were broadcast on TV Senado, Brazil’s version of C-SPAN, and were viewed by more than two million people. 

Bolsonaro’s international allies were also quick to respond to his defeat. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's former strategist, had warned of a “stolen election” in the lead-up to polling day and promoted the hashtag #BrazilianSpring across his social media channels. On the day of the invasion of Brasília, Bannon applauded the insurrectionists, calling them “freedom fighters,” even as Bolsonaro himself was keeping a low profile. Bannon’s strategy worked. Some rioters were photographed holding up a banner demanding (in both English and Portuguese) the “source code” of the elections, a reference to the technology behind voting machines that right-wing figures like Bannon and Trump have accused of swinging the election.

Right-wing radicals and their puppeteers baptized the invasion as “Festa da Selma,” or, in English, “Selma’s Party.” The #FestadaSelma hashtag saw plenty of action on Twitter, where users tracked its popularity in southern Brazil and Miami, Florida. According to the Washington Post, Elon Musk recently fired nearly all of the company’s staff in Brazil, except for a few salespeople, leaving the country of 217 million people with virtually no staff dedicated to  moderating content that incites violence in Brazil.  

The term “Festa da Selma” began popping up on social media on January 5. It is a word play on “Festa da Selva,” which is a military war cry: organizers substituted the “v” for an “m,” perhaps in hopes of avoiding detection by Brazilian authorities or even by social media platforms. “A very common practice of [right-wing radicals] is to talk things over through codes, under the radar. They use codenames and words with modified spelling,” said Leonardo Nascimento, a professor at the Federal University of Bahia and a researcher at the Internet Lab, which monitors more than 500 extreme-right Telegram groups. Nascimento explained that on mainstream platforms, far-right individuals are more careful about the content they post and promote because they fear being banned. But the same caution does not apply to  “low-moderation” platforms. The researcher said that Telegram’s architecture, built on groups and the diffusion of messages, makes it a relative safe haven for extremism.

Telegram took on a key role in Brazilian elections in 2021, when Bolsonaro’s more prominent family members created profiles and began to direct traffic from their other social networks to Telegram. “But the platform is just a vessel. The real center of disinformation isn’t Telegram itself, it’s YouTube and YouTube videos that circulate on Telegram,” said Nascimento. And then the safe haven was forced to dissolve, at least in part. In 2022, in anticipation of the highly contested elections ahead, Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered the company to shut down select Telegram groups and remove election-related disinformation they had distributed. The aforementioned B-38 group was temporarily suspended shortly thereafter, presumably due to this decision.

The move made Bolsonaro and his supporters turn to other platforms in the far-right online ecosystem such as Gettr, Parler and CloudHub, but also to more ephemeral and privacy-intensive applications like Zello and Signal. Still, according to Nascimento, four days before “Selma’s Party,” Telegram messages were circulating among extreme-right groups advising followers on what to bring to demonstrations, how to behave on arrival and how to withstand tear gas. They also posted information about caravans and buses heading for Brasília. 

“They [rioters] wanted to make it look spontaneous so people would believe [Selma’s Party] was a movement that worked on a certain degree of legitimacy, of popular demand,” said Viktor Chagas, a professor at Fluminense Federal University in Rio de Janeiro state who researches online far-right movements. Chagas contends that Brazil’s extreme-right is now in deep dispute over the identity of Bolsonarism. “The Bolsonaro supporters are losing cohesion. We have the ultraliberals, the monarchists, the gun owners, the neo-Pentecostals and other subgroups going from a process of high centralization in the figure of Bolsonaro to a high level of fragmentation with his defeat,” explained Chagas. “We now have a network that is much more dispersed and much more difficult to monitor.”

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"My darlings, my main mission here is to talk about Jesus, but I cannot look at how we are living and not open your eyes," said Leonardo on an Instagram video, endorsing the reelection of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. The video was posted on October 3, one day after the first round of the Brazilian elections. Leonardo ended with a plea: “Leftist ideology will destroy us. Have mercy on our country.” 

Up until that day, Leonardo, who has over 33 million followers across his social media channels, had nothing to say about politics. The 32-year-old from southern Brazil had only posted motivational speeches, messages about God and the Bible, and the itinerary of his national tour. But his social media agenda changed immediately following the first round of Brazilian elections. 

In a deeply polarized country, the election was close enough that neither the right-wing populist Bolsonaro, who received 43.2% of the votes, nor Lula da Silva, his main opponent from the leftist Worker’s Party who garnered 48.4% of the votes, could claim victory. A second voting round occurs on October 30. 

In the meantime, Brazilian social media has been transformed into macabre accusations of candidate transgressions. Fake news, disinformation and misinformation have spread quickly, invoking allegations of involvement with pedophilia, freemasonry, satanic rituals and cannibalism. 

One issue, however, has dominated public debate: religion. Bolsonaro’s campaign has accused Lula of hostility to Christianity. “Religions have been instrumentalized [for political purposes] for a long time, but never like now,” said Fernanda Faria Medeiros of the Center for Studies in Communication and Theology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais.

Influencers of faith go online to evangelize, but they also seek to strengthen and consolidate institutional ties between their audiences and their churches. “We think that we’re discussing religion, but what we’re actually discussing is the morals of the candidates,” said Medeiros.

Armed with the slogan “Brazil above everything, God above all,” Bolsonaro has positioned himself as an envoy of a muscular Christianity, an ally of the growing evangelical electorate and the defender of their agendas, such as the non-decriminalization of drugs and abortion. 

“There is a very strong claim that runs through Bolsonaro's candidacy: that it is a candidacy that will build the kingdom of God,” said Jacqueline Moraes Teixeira, a professor at the University of Brasília. Bolsonaro sells himself as a politician guided by Christian ethics, said Teixeira, and that resonates with evangelicals. 

Bolsonaro has also courted evangelicals as part of his digital mobilization strategy — a centerpiece of his campaign activity. He has addressed them online and invited influencers of faith to the presidential palace on several occasions.

Yudi Tamashiro, an actor who wants to become a pastor and has millions of followers said in a video “If you follow me here, you know that every week I go to church, every week I am preaching. You already know what my vote is. My vote is for Bolsonaro.”

In the runoff, 61% of evangelical voters said they will vote for Bolsonaro, versus only 31% who say they will vote for Lula, according to a recent Datafolha survey. This could provide a decisive margin of victory for Bolsonaro. The evangelical vote is significant in Brazil: evangelicals represent 31% of Brazil’s 210 million population, and are expected to outnumber Catholics in a decade. 

The numbers should worry Lula and the Brazilian left. After the election’s first round, one of the biggest evangelical congregations, the Assembly of God, announced it will punish worshipers who “defend leftist agendas within the Marxist worldview.” Less than two weeks before the run-off, Lula issued a public letter to evangelicals stating that it was a "sad scandal" to use faith for electoral purposes, and made a commitment to the freedom of worship in the country while promising not to use symbols of faith for political gain. 

An alliance between Christian nationalism and authoritarian governance helped sweep Donald Trump into the U.S. presidency in 2016, secured majority support in Hungary to Viktor Orban, and fueled the popularity of French far-right leaders Marine le Pen and Éric Zemmour. 

Online audiences have demanded Brazilian evangelical influencers articulate this alliance out loud. On social media, the public demands a point of view, said Issaaf Karhawi, a researcher at the University of São Paulo specializing in social media. Audiences develop expectations and begin to make demands, and influencers feel compelled to reveal their politics to maintain their bond with the majority of their followers.

Influencers of faith are also modeling others’ success. In the first round of the Brazilian elections, mainstream celebrities such as the singers Anitta and Caetano Veloso supported Lula. Their campaigning had significant reach and was incorporated into Lula’s digital messaging. But their support also generated a response: influencers of faith, country singers, and others, eyeing the celebrity success in endorsing Lula, publicly embraced Bolsonaro.

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Many influencers of faith are staking out ultra-conservative, nationalist and far-right positions. These messages resonate with evangelical influencers who had never been shy about their political inclinations. “It's not a war of men, it's not a war of [political] parties, I don't even get into politics. It's just that this has gone beyond politics, it's a war of agendas," said Tiago Brunet, an evangelical pastor with five million online followers.

Evangelical support for Bolsonaro has been accompanied by accusations of a personal profit motive. Rede Super, a TV station that broadcasts evangelical programming owned by André Valadão, who has over five million followers and has preached in favor of Bolsonaro for a long time, received approximately $140,000 from Bolsonaro’s government, according to an investigation by Agência Pública.

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Other evangelical influencers have been dogged by allegations of impropriety entirely separate from politics. Evangelical pastor Ivonélio Abrahão da Silva and his influencer son Patrick Abrahão are being investigated by the Federal Police's Operation La Casa de Papel under the suspicion of a financial scheme using cryptocurrencies and emeralds that would have deceived more than one million investors in 80 countries. 

Teixeira, the professor who studies evangelical profiles and voting inclinations, said that evangelicals are not satisfied with Bolsonaro but vote for him because they are against Lula and The Worker’s Party at all costs. “They think he is the least worst in this electoral dispute, but he’s not a comfortable vote,” she adds. 

Bolsonaro’s campaign seems to know that evangelicals are not completely happy. “Don't look at my husband, look at me who is a servant of the Lord,” said First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro in October to a group of evangelical women at the Assembly of God Victory in Christ. 

Despite what it may seem, not all influencers of faith are animated by opposition to Lula. Yago Martins, head of Two Fingers of Theology, has announced that he will not vote for any candidate. Prominent pastors like Paulo Marcelo, Sérgio Dusilek and others, have publicly expressed support for Lula. 

"The digital world is built from communities of interest, or when you trigger a value that brings people together," said Karhawi, the researcher. She highlights that because of the internet’s attention span, influencers of faith can publicly support Bolsonaro now and right after the election, regardless of the result, go back to doctrinal posts about Christianity, as if nothing ever happened. Because the public is relentlessly presented with new information in social networks, there’s no time to register and elaborate, said Karhawi. Consuming social media “is going to be superficial. It's not going to generate a memory, a deep connection.”

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There was barely a mask in sight. 

Bolsonaro’s TikTok audience is exploding. His followers on the youth-dominated site grew to more than 340,000 people  at a rate of almost 50% in the past month alone. Bolsonaro tries to make authoritarianism look cool. In his TikTok profile created last June, the populist, far-right president posts videos where he goes on diplomatic missions, visits his mother, plays around with his staff, and engages in the traditional politics of hugging children and giving long motivational speeches. 

Bolsonaro is known as the “Tropical Trump”. Besides similar governing styles, both leaders rode to power attacking the press as fake news and Big Tech for persecuting them. While Trump was in office, Bolsonaro made no secret of his admiration, and looked to the American for direction. Since Trump’s failure to win re-election, however, Bolsonaro has gone role model shopping. 

He has found what he’s looking for in the young men’s aisle. 

With elections coming up in October, Bolsonaro is adjusting his strategy to mimic the social media tactics of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, who calls himself the “world’s coolest dictator.” Salvadoran researcher Manuel Meléndez-Sánchez coined the term “millennial authoritarianism” to explain the rise to power of the 40-year-old Bukele.

Bolsonaro is 66 years old. Still, the term applies to him, too, argues Vitor Machado, a political researcher at the Federal University of Paraná, in southern Brazil. Millennial authoritarianism is a political strategy, says Machado, that encompasses authoritarian behavior, populist appeals, and a modern and youthful personal brand built mainly via social media. Bolsonaro has associated his online identity with his millennial sons –who are themselves politicians– while, says Machado, fine-tuning his social media discourse to resonate with millennials. 

Speaking the same language as young people has become a key tactic for many Latin American leaders regardless of ideological leanings — from leftists such as newly-elected Gabriel Boric in Chile to authoritarians such as Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and Juan Orlando Hernández in Honduras. 

For Brazil, where Bolsonaro is widely viewed by political scientists as a threat to the future of democracy, the president’s ability to manipulate youth sentiment with his newfound social media hipness has radically changed the election calculus. 

“I see only three options: prison, death, or victory,” said Bolsonaro when questioned about the upcoming election during a meeting of religious leaders last September. More than once, the president has threatened a military coup if he loses his mandate. Though after recent confrontations with the Supreme Court — which is currently considering five criminal inquiries into the president — he has downplayed his threat. “Who never told a little lie to their girlfriend? If you didn’t, the night wouldn’t end well,” he said to the laughter of an audience of allies. 

The Bolsonaro Family on TikTok 

When searching “Bolsonaro” on TikTok, dozens of related hashtags appeared, including “bolsonaro2022” and its less popular counterpart “bolsonarocorrupt.” The total posts with the “Bolsonaro” tag have, collectively, more than five billion views. And, although TikTok has a delicate relationship with political content because of its moderation guidelines, Bolsonaro does not seem to be dividing opinions. 

The platform appears to be on his side: the first 15 hashtags that pop up are either positive or neutral. 

“Populist discourse is easy to understand and offers easy solutions,” says Veridiana Cordeiro, one of the lead researchers of Digital Sociology and Artificial Intelligence at the University of São Paulo. According to Cordeiro, millennials seek unconventional forms of political and civic engagement, and being active on social media is among them. “Flashy and performative posts are what bring adherence on social networks. Bolsonaro has managed to gain popularity with this type of political strategy.”. 

Bolsonaro follows only four people on TikTok: Senator Flávio Bolsonaro who joined the platform last May and is known in Brazil as “son 01”; city councilor Carlos Bolsonaro who joined last October and is known as “son 02”; a Wolverine cosplay; and a Brazilian magician. 

Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro, “son 03”, does not have a TikTok profile and has even argued in favor of banning the app in Brazil.

Meanwhile, the president does not follow 23-year-old “son 04.” This is puzzling because Jair Renan was the first in his family to create a TikTok account, last March, and has the largest number of followers: almost 430,000. In his posts, he is an ardent proponent of his father’s politics.  

In one video, he makes fun of products from China and criticizes their quality. In another, he appears in a shooting range, playing with rifles of different models.

“Not only Jair Renan, but the entire family fuels millennial authoritarianism,” explains Machado. Jair Renan’s half-brothers, Flávio and Carlos, also have their share of popular posts. Flávio regularly shows videos of Bolsonaro engaged in “cool activities” such as riding a sports car that belongs to the Federal Police and playing football with Arab sheiks. 

Brazil has 160 million social media users, more than any other non-Asian country except the United States. Brazilians also score high in terms of time dedicated to social media, reaching almost 4 hours a day, behind the Philippines and Columbia, according to We Are Social. 

The amount of time that Brazilians spend on social media has helped Bolsonaro in the past. In 2018, the year he won the election, the Supreme Electoral Court gave him only 48 seconds per week of unpaid electoral advertisements on public radio and television. Bolsonaro was affiliated with the Social Liberal Party, and, because of the party’s low representation rates, was granted less exposure time than his main opponents — lefist Fernando Haddad, from the Worker’s Party, and centrist Ciro Gomes, from the Democratic Labour Party. 

As a result of these disadvantages on broadcast media, Bolsonaro took his presidential campaign to social media and won. He now has social media accounts in conservative social networks such as Gettr and Parler. In fact, he is the only world leader active on both outlier platforms. 

These apps have grown rapidly in Brazil by promising a hands-off approach on censorship and the spread of misinformation. According to data company Sensor Tower, downloads of Gettr and Parler in Brazil are the second-highest of any country, just behind the United States.

Still, they are tiny compared to the number of Brazilians using Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, and the other major apps in Brazil. TikTok alone has almost 5 million users. Millennial authoritarianism, therefore, has become a crucial component of his re-election bid. 

This puts Bolsonaro in something of a vice, says Issaaf Karhawi, a researcher at the the University of São Paulo specialized in social media. While hostile to the biggest social media platforms, he depends on them to mainstream his online engagement. Karhawi says that Bolsonaro and his family have built a social media juggernaut around themselves — a community that started with 8 million followers and that now, four years later, amounts to over 42 million, almost twice as many as his five main potential opponents in the upcoming election.

Bolsonaro’s brand of politics comes at an opportune time for capturing Brazil’s youth vote. Research suggests that millennials are disillusioned with liberal democracy and increasingly open to non-democratic forms of government. “Unlike their parents who experienced an authoritarian regime, millennials grew up in a democratic government and find themselves politically disillusioned and disengaged,” argues Cordeiro, the digital sociology expert at the University of São Paulo, who says the absence of a living memory of military dictatorship is decisive in Brazil. 

Bolsonaro uses this “foggy memory” to push country-first, socially conservative, and ethnically majoritarian policies and posts and is able to leverage the divisiveness common to both social networks and populist politics. “If we continue to observe the prevalence of polarized attitudes among millennials, we can increasingly have fertile ground for populist policies,” Cordeiro said. 

Fake news as a strategy 

Discrediting legitimate media reports as “fake news” has been a central component of Bolsonaro’s administration. The president frequently encourages his supporters to follow him on his social media channels so he can bypass the press, control his image, and shape the political narrative around himself while disavowing democratic institutions.

He is also accused of spreading disinformation and misinformation. A Federal Police case is looking into the so-called “Office of Hate”: a pro-Bolsonaro online apparatus allegedly led by Bolsonaro’s sons and a group of young supporters committed to attacking government opponents and journalists. 

In the congress, legislators have tried to find solutions, presenting at least 45 bills aimed at curbing the spread of fake news. The measures proposed are diverse. Some would allow users who share fake news to be prosecuted as criminals; and some pressure tech platforms to ban Bolsonaro, his family, and his supporters — similar to what happened with Trump in early 2021. 

Aware of the possibility of losing his profiles on key social media channels, Bolsonaro is taking countermeasures of his own. In September 2021, he signed a decree forbidding social media platforms from banning users or taking down their content without a court order. It marked the first time social media companies had been stopped by a national government from taking down users’ content from their own platforms. 

The decree was ruled unconstitutional just a few days later but it set Bolsonaro on a path to use all tools and maneuvers at his disposal to protect himself and his allies on social media.

The researcher also says that even though Bolsonaro has had a good run on social media, his strategy is dangerous. “When we see a president communicating almost exclusively on social media, we slowly observe a disavowal of democratic institutions, more specifically of the media, both traditional media and institutional or governmental media,” says Karhawi. “There is no such thing as an individual capable of embodying politics, the media and the truth.”

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