In October, across more than 5,000 cities throughout Brazil, voters will cast ballots for mayoral contests and select winners for other local positions. Brazil’s city elections will take place within an increasingly polarized national context. At the same time, the country’s ban on X is working its way through the courts, indicating the potential for a rapidly shifting online information ecosystem.

Confia will build on Meedan’s previous work in Brazil, Confirma 2022. During this earlier election project, Check’s shared feed feature facilitated scaled fact-check distribution for a service run by the country’s leading election authority.

“We learned a lot from Confirma 2022, and the plan now is to continue evolving our efforts in partnership with Pacto and everybody else in the Confia coalition,” said Amaralina Rodrigues Xavier, a senior program manager at Meedan.

“At Pacto, all of our members have an unwavering commitment to preserving and strengthening Brazil’s democratic processes and institutions,” Executive Director Flávia Pellegrino said.

A coalition approach to immediate action and long-term strategy

Confia, which means “trust” in English, is an effort to analyze disinformation related to electoral contests in the region and to intervene in strategic ways.

As a coalition of more than 200 civil society organizations, Pacto brings together a wide variety of groups that hold varying perspectives. Their unifying shared goal is to bolster democratic processes throughout Brazilian society.

In particular, a dozen highly active Pacto member organizations will contribute to this project:

To create a comprehensive dataset about the country’s electorate, the Confia coalition will collect information pertaining to the experiences of voters in diverse regions, from various social and economic classes, and possessing a wide variety of cultural backgrounds. Through these efforts, Confia members will be able to better understand the most prevalent disinformation narratives circulating in the country and identify which information producers and distribution channels to watch for.

Findings from a final report about the 2024 municipal elections — and its associated dataset — will inform efforts to reinforce election integrity during Brazil’s 2026 presidential election season through advocacy, mobilization, policymaking, content creation, and other campaigns.

Meanwhile, the independent fact-checking groups and newsrooms Comprova, Lupa, and UOL will share fact-checks and explainers that will be distributed back to audience members on the Confia WhatsApp tipline.

Piloting Timpani for additional insights

Meedan will also trial a new data processing project called Timpani to support the Brazilian election efforts. Through the use of this new technology, Meedan and its partners hope to review text from relevant third-party sources to gain useful information about the election-related themes circulating online in Brazil. In this way, Confia participants aim to situate the potential disinformation collected through tiplines within the context of wider information ecosystems.

‍Learn more about Confia and find out how you can help support the effort today.

Tags
Misinformation
Disinformation
Elections
Timpani
Brazil

Footnotes

  1. Online conversations are heavily influenced by news coverage, like the 2022 Supreme Court decision on abortion. The relationship is less clear between big breaking news and specific increases in online misinformation.
  2. The tweets analyzed were a random sample qualitatively coded as “misinformation” or “not misinformation” by two qualitative coders trained in public health and internet studies.
  3. This method used Twitter’s historical search API
  4. The peak was a significant outlier compared to days before it using Grubbs' test for outliers for Chemical Abortion (p<0.2 for the decision; p<0.003 for the leak) and Herbal Abortion (p<0.001 for the decision and leak).
  5. All our searches were case insensitive and could match substrings; so, “revers” matches “reverse”, “reversal”, etc.

References

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Published on

September 9, 2024