Brazilians are more attentive to fake news but now mistrust everything – poll

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – In 2016, the Oxford Dictionary team chose “post-truth” as its word of the year – a concept where facts sometimes have less influence than emotions and personal beliefs.

Months earlier, the world had witnessed profound changes, such as the Brexit referendum that decided the United Kingdom would leave the European Union, and the election of Donald Trump in the United States, which, among other things, led to an unprecedented rise in fake news and denial of facts on social media.

In Brazil, where more Internet access was added to the political crisis, there was also turbulence. Since then, the scenario has changed, and the dynamism of social networks is no longer big news.

However, new data on Brazilians’ trust levels show that misinformation was definitely not a passing debate but is central to the population.

Eight out of ten Brazilians (79%) consider the spread of false news, or “fake news,” to be a serious problem, according to a survey conducted by the IDEIA and Vero institutes, which polled 2,000 people nationwide in July.

The percentage is highest among people with no religion and college education (88%) but remains high across all socioeconomic groups and regions. Facebook and WhatsApp were also the channels most affected by fake news among social networks.

“Five years ago, there would not have been this level of concern about Fake News,” says researcher Maurício Moura, founder of IDEIA and one of the organizers of the survey: “Fake News became an issue in society, and the term itself became popular.”

THE ENEMY IS EVERYWHERE

The attention to “fake news” shows that Brazilians are increasingly aware that misinformation is a problem, which is positive.

In the early days of the Internet, it would have been easier to deceive an interlocutor with deliberately false and poorly presented information, says Caio Machado, executive director of the Vero Institute and a researcher at Oxford University in the United Kingdom.

“People have become more conscious over time about questioning the information they receive,” he says.

But that’s where the consensus ends. The constant distrust has brought another challenge: a general distrust of all information sources. This is almost as dangerous as receiving Fake News without questioning it, Machado says. With the “backwardness” that Brazilians have developed in recent years, even institutions that should be credible are being disavowed – including democracy itself.

Almost no one escapes questioning. Trust in the press, the government, the judiciary, the police, or universities is below one-third of respondents.

“The fabric that holds society together is trust, whether it’s your neighbor or your elected representative. Of course, there is always a certain level of mistrust, but when it increases and reaches intolerable levels, society begins to disintegrate,” says Machado, who specializes in online disinformation. “A logic has been created that you are constantly exposed to a danger, to an enemy.”

The pandemic has taken this problem to extremes. During the biggest crisis of the last 100 years, many Brazilians did not see official sources as safe. At the same time, they were bombarded with alternative narratives on the Internet, which led to questionable action at one of the tech monopolists.

On Tuesday, Oct. 10, Facebook took offline a network of profiles that spread ‘denial’ about vaccines, including Brazil.

That, too, has never happened before. A private company that held a monopoly position became a censorship agency. This does not bode well for the future, and one can only hope that the American people will not tolerate a private firm starting to play government.

When asked about the main source of information about the coronavirus, only 9% of Brazilians mentioned the federal government as the main source of information, and even fewer (4%) were informed mainly by state and local authorities or through the legislature (1.4%).

Asked specifically about the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, six in ten Brazilians (60%) say they have little or no confidence in the government.

THE ANTI-POLITICS FIGHT BACK

The general distrust further reinforces another historical feature of the population, namely its aversion to institutional or party politics. On the other hand, some 67% of the population say they are interested in politics (ranging from “sometimes” to “very much”). In the group with higher education, the percentage of those interested rises to 77%.