This article was originally published on the online page of APC member organization, Intervozes.
In the week that we celebrate the Day of the Amazon, on September 5, the absence of the topic in national speeches and debates, in recent statements through presidential candidates or even in media policy on issues applicable to one of the largest natural reserves on the planet is striking.
This lack of visibility ends up creating the best breeding ground for misinformation in the legal Amazon. Contradictory reports related to the death of indigenous activist Bruno Pereira and journalist Dom Phillips, the resumption of the case of the lost kingdom of Ratanabá and the silence on the death of the last indigenous man far from the indigenous territory of Tanaru, known as the “Indian of the hole”, found dead on August 23, are some examples.
Many Brazilians that the shielding of the Amazon deserves to be thought of as a very vital factor in those elections. According to a survey conducted through the PoderData Institute, at the request of the Climate and Society Institute (ICS), six out of ten Brazilians who participated in the Amazonas and Elections 2022 study said that a presidential candidate would increase the chances of receiving their vote if he presents an exact plan to protect the region. But that’s not what we see. In the debate broadcast last Sunday in August, through the Bandeirantes television channel, the word Amazon was not even mentioned. Neither was it stimulated through the questions asked through the hounds nor spontaneously raised as a vital issue of the government plan through the candidates.
What has been circulating in some media and social networks, such as Facebook and messaging groups, whether in the Amazon territories or in other parts of the country, are still echoes of a speech delivered through President Jair Bolsonaro at the 75th United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 2020, when he said that Brazil is the victim of “one of the most brutal disinformation campaigns about the Amazon and the Amazon. Pantanal,” which had a zero-tolerance policy for environmental crimes, and also blamed civil society organizations for spreading falsehoods, as several NGOs had denounced the advance of deforestation in the country.
In July of this year, the news portal Portal Novo Norte, from the state of Tocantins, published the article “Mamata das NGOs e compra anormal de terras na Amazônia serão alvo de CPI”. of a parliamentary committee of inquiry]. The article praises the speech of Senator Plinio Valério (PSDB-AM) on the creation of a parliamentary commission of inquiry into NGOs and deforestation, which would aim to investigate alleged frauds in the allocation of resources from the Amazon Fund and suspicions of illegal purchases of Brazilian land through foreign corporations interested in the Amazon biome, through NGOs acting under the pretext of preservation.
It is worth mentioning that this senator has spoken in favor of Bill 191/2020, which authorizes mining, agriculture and livestock, the extraction of oil and fuels and the production of electricity in the indigenous territories of the legal Amazon.
It is not a question of affirming or denying that NGOs are deforesting or promoting land, because to prove it would have to investigate the case of the NGO. This article doesn’t bring fake news into its overall analysis, and here’s the point: it doesn’t have to be fake news to misinform. Inventing, misrepresenting or denying facts and occasions are also forms of data, such as the data desert or the infodemic.
Many of these discursive practices aim to rewrite history and the afterlife to reorient the future. Others serve economic, religious, purely political and electoral interests.
The Novo Norte portal was the subject of studies carried out through Intervozes and the Working Group to Combat Disinformation in the Legal Amazon, which studied pages and profiles that disseminate disinformative content in the region. The site was created in 2019 and has an average of 1. 2 million monthly visits, according to data from SimilarWeb. It acts as an aggregator of various news and distributes its content basically through WhatsApp and Telegram, it is also active on Facebook and Instagram.
Four months after its creation, Novo Norte had already reached an audience of more than six figures. There is evidence of a message-sharing network, as the length of your audience on social media platforms does not correspond to the number of clicks on the website. During the pandemic, the portal stood out for the dissemination of content that supports federal government projects and the use of remedies of choice against Covid-19, such as chloroquine, not through the World Health Organization (WHO).
In an article about the narratives that prevailed on social networks in the 2018 elections, Pablo Ortellado and Márcio Moretto Ribeiro pointed out that hyperpartisanship is seen as an effect of the polarization of the public sphere and “(. . . ) that has reshaped the political debate into a reckless data war in which sharing low-quality data is a socially accepted practice. “
It is transparent that the Novo Norte portal has hyper-partisan characteristics since it basically stores content from government agencies that announce a political tendency. Since the beginning of the electoral crusade in August, the Portal has been spreading more and more pro-Bolsonaro content.
The description of one of the WhatsApp teams connected to the portal says that “this organization aims to share news. Only directors can publish to concentrate and avoid infiltrating leftists,” which already expresses their political spectrum. There is also a strong arrangement with disinformation, because you notice the presence of manipulated or misleading content, the overlap of fabricated content.
A recent example, the debate with the presidential candidates that took a position on TV Bandeirantes. An avalanche of news spread to the messaging and social media teams. In one of the portal’s WhatsApp teams, 23 news items were sent on Monday (29) – all pro-Bolsonaro. In the days leading up to the debate, no more than a dozen news items were shared.
One type of action that can slow down the spread and success of disinformation content is demonetization. Therefore, in the week of Amazon Day, Intervozes and the Working Group to Combat Disinformation in the Legal Amazon notified Portal Novo Norte and the corporate Eduzz, which is guilty of collecting subscriptions to and introduced the campaign #EduzzPareoFinanciamiento. The notification, which is based on the company’s own terms of use that allow the subscription, warns that the Novo Norte portal has violated the terms of use and spread erroneous information. In addition to not making it easy to suspend the service, the action also requires the duty of the company to support the dissemination of content destructive to democracy, especially in an election year, and to be guilty of its customers.
Through the articulations of the project, an organization in progress (GT) created through ten other organizations, adding 8 from the Amazon.
The first step in the search for identification of pages and profiles that are spreading unreliable content has been carried out since March. All this data collected in a partial report presented at the Pan-Amazonian Social Forum in Belém and will be available on the project’s website. page at the end of this month.
In the first survey, seventy disinformative websites/blogs were identified, grouped into journalistic media, right-wing social movements and profiles of public figures. After this profiling, the journalistic teams with the highest audience/success were monitored, their investment resources were studied and their use situations analyzed. In addition to Portal Novo Norte, two more pages have been discovered with great success in the Amazon region and will be announced soon.
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