The Brazilian left beat the far-right at their own game
Garbage Day on how Lula's Army beat Bolsonaro, despite Meta's thumb on the scales:
"The country’s biggest newspaper, Folha, found that Meta AI programs built into the app would generate content supporting Bolsonaro and his Liberal Party (PL), but not da Silva’s PT. They also reported that right-wing WhatsApp posts had almost double the reach of left-wing ones. Brazil’s Supreme Court was able to order Meta to alter their algorithms, after internal documents showed Meta knew they were prioritizing Bolsonaro. Meta claimed they weren’t doing it intentionally, but they didn’t need to. They just weren’t stopping Bolsonaro’s supporters from using every single growth hack at their disposal. "
"Exército do Lula ["Lula's Army"] had a similar gamified “posting mission” strategy to both Direita Já and Porto-Vozes de Lula, but it was more popular by orders of magnitude: By election day on October 25th, the channel had almost 11 million members. After da Silva was elected, he thanked Janones, the app’s “general” who personally assigned missions to its “soldiers”."
Tags: lula meta facebook whatsapp social-media elections campaigning politics brazil garbage-day