World News | Swift Backlash for Brazil Students Targeting Misinformation
Get latest articles and stories on World at LatestLY. Before dawn on Dec 1, Leonardo de Carvalho Leal prepared to leave his family behind in the Brazilian city of Ponta Grossa, in Parana state. His mother overwhelmed him with goodbyes and gifted him a bracelet she said had brought her luck.
Rio De Janeiro, Dec 13 (AP) Before dawn on Dec 1, Leonardo de Carvalho Leal prepared to leave his family behind in the Brazilian city of Ponta Grossa, in Parana state. His mother overwhelmed him with goodbyes and gifted him a bracelet she said had brought her luck.
He fiddled with it on his wrist the entire ride to the airport, unsure when he might see her again.
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“Maybe I was blaming myself a bit, for leaving so many people vulnerable,” he said in a video interview with The Associated Press, with tears welling as he recalled his departure. “But what I did was right.”
Leal and his girlfriend of six years, Mayara Stelle -- both 22-year-old law students -- this year created a Twitter account with its stated mission to call out Brazilian websites for spreading “hate speech and Fake News,” and torpedoing those sites' advertising revenue. They garnered 410,000 followers, more than the number of residents in their mid-size city.
They also mustered a legion of enemies. Vitriol poured in, directed toward their account, Sleeping Giants Brazil. Believing their identities are soon to be revealed after a ruling against Twitter, they expect they will be personally targeted, for lawsuits or worse.
Fear their families would be caught in the barrage because they had often accessed the account at their parents' homes, they say, is why they left their lives behind and are choosing to make their identities known to The Associated Press and Folha de S.Paulo, Brazil's biggest newspaper.
The AP observed them accessing and using the Sleeping Giants Brazil account, and checked the names they provided against their government-issued identification cards.
“Those threats that say, 'I'm going to kill you,' or, 'I'm offering 100,000 reais (USD 20,000) for the head of the profile's owner,' will now be directed at Mayara and Leo,” Stelle said from a city outside Sao Paulo. “This is a decision to protect our families and control exposure to show we're common people, like anyone else who can have an idea. And that idea can be brilliant, can change things.”
This year, Brazil has been awash in misinformation about the pandemic, egged on by dubious claims from President Jair Bolsonaro. It marks the continuation of a digital battle in Latin America's biggest country, with each side in the polarized nation seeking to portray itself as “owner of the truth,” as an expression in Portuguese goes.
Pursuit of Sleeping Giants Brazil is part of a growing trend over the last several years to instrumentalize the judiciary against those who train fire on conservative media outlets, interest groups and Bolsonaro's administration, according to Taís Gasparian, a partner at law firm Rodrigues Barbosa, Mac Dowell de Figueiredo, Gasparian who has worked with media and free speech for decades.
Often the alleged offenses may be covered by rights of free speech or press freedom. This year, that has included a writer, a cartoonist and a beach volleyball player.
Sleeping Giants Brazil followed the playbook of its US predecessor, which after Donald Trump's 2016 presidential victory alerted companies to the fact their ads were appearing on websites including Breitbart News, a platform that critics have repeatedly accused of running racist, xenophobic and sexist content.
Companies' ads were often automatically placed through Google, and they decamped en masse upon learning of risk to their brands. Video that surfaced in mid-2019 showed Breitbart's former executive chairman Steve Bannon saying Sleeping Giants had cost the organization 90% of its ad revenue. (AP)
(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)