RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) This week, UN Secretary-General Antônio Guterres introduced a revealing fact: around the world, 40 percent of posts on Covid-19 appearing on a large social platform were conducted by robots.
If the fact itself is surprising, the question that needs to be asked is obvious: who does this effort serve? Why would a movement disguised as anonymous individuals – and therefore as a mass movement – seek to influence public opinion on a pandemic that has, in the US, killed more than the Vietnam War?
And why do leaders of purportedly democratic nations engage in explicit or “spontaneous” attacks on the press, a possible antidote to the spread of misinformation?
On Sunday, on the international day of freedom of expression, journalists were attacked in Brasília. The Presidency chose to downplay the incidents. Days later, President Jair Bolsonaro himself exposed his most intimate nature by telling a reporter to “shut up”, and insulted the press.
Journalists are just part of a new power routine. On Tuesday, Bolsonaro shouted at journalists twice, telling them to “shut up”, something only the dictatorship had ever seen in Brazil. But reports are spreading across the country about how nurses and doctors are being targeted by government supporters.
There is no shortage of attacks against teachers, artists, intellectuals, or scientists, all of whom are perceived as potential threats. Meanwhile, on social media, thousands of robots and genuine supporters of a violent movement are turning platforms into trenches full of lies.
In speeches, hardly ever improvised, God and hate blend into the same sentences. Judas is evoked to attack old pillars of the movement. Religion starts to legitimize human rights abuses. Prayers are asked for a leader whose pledge was to exterminate the right to a fair trial. Everyone stands as a person of good will. Everyone stands as patriots, the only ones allowed to wear the national colors.
In the streets, in the squares, in the virtual world or in daily violence, all these characters share something in common: the contempt for democracy. The noise produced by this group, instigated by their leaders, is certainly greater than their true number of supporters. But still, such a mass is relevant in the scenario in which we live. A mass that combines social classes under a single ideology, with a fanatical behavior capable of causing chronic deafness.
Instrumentalized, it fulfills precisely one goal, both online and offline: that of awarding popular legitimacy to a clearly authoritarian movement. “It was a spontaneous demonstration of democracy,” the President said, referring to recent demonstrations.
None of this is new, of course. No authoritarian regime has ever been established without a prior manipulation of a section of society.
Hannah Arendt points out how, years before such forces came to power in Europe, class societies were dissolved into masses. Political parties were destroyed and replaced only by ideologies. This weekend in Brasília, the caravans of authoritarianism were the dystopia of a dream of a city erected to be the capital of a new and democratic century.
In the shadows of the architect’s lines were the reflections of a part of society that has never viewed democracy enthusiastically, that has always distrusted the notion of pluralism, that has never understood the notion of the public welfare and that, with its insulting selfishness, nourishes the conviction that institutions are a fraud.
Threatened by the virus and by a brutal recession, the Government mobilizes its troops blinded by ignorance to defend itself, to deepen its contempt for the truth, and to push a country to the limit of its national cohesion.
All indications point in the same direction: Brazilian democracy is threatened and its dismantling takes place in broad daylight. In every challenge fired at one of the governmental branches, in every gesture of violence, in every lie spread and in every casket buried.
The V-Dem Institute of the University of Gothenburg, one of the largest databases on democracies in the world, has stopped classifying Brazil as a “liberal democracy” since the beginning of this year. Now, the country is classified as a mere “electoral democracy”.
The institute has produced and collected data on countries from 1789 to 2019, and finds that over the past ten years, the deterioration of democracy in Brazil has only been greater than that observed in Hungary, Turkey, Poland, and Serbia.
According to Staffan Lindberg, one of the authors of the study and the institute’s director, this trend has more recently taken on a new dimension. “Brazil was one of the countries in the world that recorded the greatest drop in democracy indices in the last three years,” he cautioned.
At the UN, high-level offices of the organization are overwhelmed by concerns around the anti-democratic rhetoric and the real shrinkage of civil space. For the first time in decades, the country is denounced in international forums, accused even of flirting with the risk of genocide.
In other words: the inalienable right to live in a full democracy is not guaranteed. The Center for the Future of Democracies at Cambridge University was categorical in a recent report on the situation of democracies in the world: “For Brazil, it seems, the future has been once again deferred”.
While this eternal pledge is once again tortured, the boundary between the hypnotized mass and the robots programmed to spread misinformation seems to be crumbling, as the institutional and values crisis deepens.
In the virtual world or in a sunny square, both are tasked with spreading a deadly virus: the pandemic of hatred, capable of crippling a democracy. As a trophy, its “myth” will rule over skeletons, gags, and carcasses.
Yet, with the black smoke disgracing the horizon of the Central Planalto, Brazil’s “myth” will solemnly declare, “So what?”
Source: El País