The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Michael Fox:

Hi folks. Before I get started, let me just say that if you’re not already following Pan-American Dispatch, please check it out. That is our new website covering the Brazilian elections around the clock. It’s a project of The Real News in partnership with Global Exchange. We are on the ground in Brazil. You can find us at panamericandispatch.org or on Instagram X and bluesky@padispatch. Okay, I hope you enjoy the show. This week, Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters posted this video on his Instagram account.

Roger Waters:

You have an election on Sunday in Brazil. I love Brazil. I’ve done many, many. My name’s Roger Waters, by the way.

Michael Fox:

He looks straight at the camera. MPB, popular Brazilian music is playing softly in the background. I love how succinct his assessment is.

Roger Waters:

So the two candidates are Bolsonaro, who is the son of an asshole. He’s an asshole himself. He comes from a long line of assholes. He is in cahoots with the United States of America who want to steal everything that you have in Brazil that’s of any value, not just the Amazon forest, but also any minerals or anything that you might have. They want to give it to the Trump family and to Jared Kushner and those other assholes in the ruling elite. Okay.

Michael Fox:

He says he’s met Lula, that Lula’s an honest man and that people should let him go on working for them.

Roger Waters:

Sunday, the important thing is turnout. Turnout. It was only 78% in the first round. We need 90%, 95%, 100% turnout. If you have a grandmother who can’t get out of a chair to go to the polling station, carry her, put her on a donkey, put her in her car, take her to the polling station and vote, vote, vote. Only you can save Brazil from the machinations of the gangsters who pretend to be the government in the United States of America and their allies in Brazil like the Bolsonaros. Okay. Please, please, please.

Michael Fox:

Huge elections are taking place this Sunday, October 25th. In the first round on October 4th, far-right senator and presidential candidate Flavio Bolsonaro came in two points ahead of President Luis Idnacio Lula de Silva. Bolsonaro is the son of the former far right president Jair Bolsonaro, a close ally of US President Donald Trump. Remember, Jair Bolsonaro is currently under house arrest for attempting to carry out a coup to hold onto power after he lost the 2022 vote. Flavier Bolsonaro’s victory in the first round earlier this month was a shock for much of the country. Lula led almost all the polls ahead of the election. His supporters were despondent and then this happened.

The left woke up in Brazil. That is a student march in Nitaroy, Rio de Janeiro. The evening after the vote, the images filled people’s feeds. Hope spread like wildfire. This is just one meeting I attended in Florianopolis a couple of days after the election. That is the capital of Santa Catarina, one of the most conservative states in the country. They expected a couple of hundred people, thousands turned out. An impromptu march stretched for blocks into the city’s downtown. I spoke with one woman in the march. Her name is Luana Hiberu. She told me, “We’re making part of history, taking to the streets once again to defend the minimum rights that we have achieved and to ensure that our country doesn’t return to 1964 again,” she told me. 1964 was the year of the Brazilian coup that sank the country into a military dictatorship that would last for 21 years.

People on the streets in recent weeks say they are fighting for the country’s very democracy.

President Lula told people that he was getting to work. “Bolsonaro supporters had better get ready,” he said, “because we are going to defeat you.” Abstention in the first round was the highest the country had seen in nearly 30 years. Now the campaign was on to win over the undecided and the more than 30 million people who didn’t vote. Students led the way. Marches and rallies spilled over the country, the likes of which Brazil has not seen in a long time, organizing in cities and neighborhoods, pamphleting, talking to their neighbors, getting out the vote. Record-breaking rallies have taken place in cities across Brazil. More than a million people marched alongside President Lula down Paulista Avenue in Sao Paulo, and people have been organizing online as well, but it has not been easy.

Big tech, and in particular Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, have been actively helping to lift Bolsonaro’s presence online over that of President Lula. Meta temporarily suspended Lula’s campaign page on Facebook. It blocked more than a thousand pro Lula accounts and allowed its algorithm to benefit Bolsonaro while hindering Lula’s campaign. Meta admits that there has not been parity in its treatment of the candidates, but it accuses mechanical glitches. Meanwhile, a Meta AI chatbot admitted to one graduate student that, “Meta indeed has a clear political and economic interest in the election of Flavio Bolsonaro.” I want to talk about something important today. Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg is a close political ally of US President Donald Trump. Flavio Bolsonaro has promised that if he is elected, he will join Trump’s counter-cartel coalition and open up Brazil’s rare earth minerals to the United States. That is something that big tech companies are interested in because those minerals are necessary for their hardware, AI, and data centers.

The UN criticized Meta this week and called on the platform not to interfere in Brazil’s democratic process. UN special rapporteurs wrote in a statement, “Digital platforms should not become unaccountable gatekeepers of political debate, nor should their systems be vulnerable to undue influence from political actors.” Brazilians have protested at Meta’s headquarters in Sao Paulo, and they’ve turned to creativity to try and break the bubble of the algorithm and spread their message to precious undecided voters who can make or break this election.

Meta and its secret algorithm have become the latest tool of US intervention in Latin America. It is not a branch of the US government, but it’s working in tandem. A former Meta Brazil worker told journalist Lais Covella earlier this month that ahead of the election, Meta laid off a team of human moderators who reviewed content. The system was switched to AI. The person said, “That means decisions are now coming from a single automated command possibly issued from the United States designed to boost certain content while burying the rest.” We do not know what the Meta algorithm is. Meta won’t disclose it, but we can see what it’s doing and we can connect the dots. Joel Ferez Jr. is a political scientist at Rio de Janeiro State University.

Joao Feres Junior:

If you see that in general, the guys who own the companies, the CEOs and stuff, show external signs of being politically aligned with extreme right in the United States with Trump, right? So if you know that they divulge the way they conduct their business, and on the other tip, you get the results. They’re very imbalanced as we’re seeing here. You have enough reasons to at least suspect them, to suspect they’re doing something.

Michael Fox:

They are clearly doing something. They’re attempting to influence public opinion ahead of Brazil’s elections and thereby influence the outcome of the vote. That and much, much more in a minute. This is Under the Shadow, an investigative narrative podcast series that looks at the role of the United States abroad in the past and the very present. This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA. I’m your host, Michael Fox, longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist, the producer and host of the podcast Brazil on Fire: Stories of Resistance and the Battle for Free Speech. I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 years in Latin America. I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad, and most often sadly, it is not for the better. Invasions, coups, sanctions, support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years.

It still does. This is season two of Under the Shadow: Trump’s attack, episode 16, Meta and the Brazilian Elections.

Okay, so today, folks, I’m going to do things a little differently. I’m going to bring in a friend and fellow journalist to discuss where we are right now, what’s at stake, and in particular to look at the role that Meta is playing ahead of the second round of the Brazilian elections on Sunday. This is something he and I have been paying particular attention to in recent weeks. His name is Brian Meer. He has a master’s degree from Loyola University of Chicago and the University of London. He’s lived in Brazil for more than 30 years, and he co-hosts a weekly Portuguese language web TV program called Globalistas on Brazil 247. He’s a correspondent for Telesur English, and he works with me as an editor of Pan-American Dispatch, which we launched ahead of the Brazilian vote. All right, we’re recording. Brian, thank you so much for joining me today.

This is fantastic. I really appreciate it, and thank you so much for all of your work, always ongoing. These are insane times.

Brian Mier:

Thanks for having me.

Michael Fox:

So Brian, I want this to be… I kind of mentioned, I’m hoping that this can be kind of a conversation about what’s happening right now. We are a few days out from the vote, and I’m hoping to map this out for a US audience and for a podcast that is particularly focused on US intervention in Latin America. And there’s so many layers that you and I have been working on for the last month or more, and folks who are listening to this, if you don’t already subscribe and know Pan-American Dispatch, please check it out because we’ve been doing it around the clock for the last month, and we’ll be covering the elections around the clock, and we’re just translating tons of articles, and I think it’s really an important site for news and analysis of exactly what’s happening on the ground right now in Brazil.

But Brian, if we’re taking the 10,000 foot view, where do you see things right now?

Brian Mier:

Well, we’re in a crisis of democracy in Brazil. This is the most complicated election since the return to democracy because we have the son of a man who’s in jail along with 28 cronies of his for attempting to implement a military coup, a man who was a former operative during the military dictatorship. He was a captain in the army. We have his son running under the promise to immediately pardon his father and give him a high ranking job in the government, essentially turning control over the government to his father if he’s elected, which represents the biggest threat to democracy since the return, since the end of the dictatorship, because what we’re really talking about is a state of exception. It’s also a very big risk for the Amazon rainforest as Jay Bolsonaro is present slashed the budgets, dismantled all of the environmental protection agencies, including the satellite fire monitoring system, the universities that study the departments are studying deforestation just on a vast scale and gave constant dog whistles to loggers and soy plantation farmers and ranchers that they could cut out whatever they wanted.

And it’s a threat for sovereignty because we have a candidate for the first time in Brazilian history who’s promising to turn over control of his transition team to the Trump administration if he’s elected and also to provide monopolistic access to Brazil’s rare earths at the expense of all the other countries we’re interested, Brazil being the second largest reserves of rare earth minerals in the world.

And also it would be the last country, one of the last countries in the Americas and the largest country in the Americas that will cease to be governed by a leftist political party. So on various different levels, it’s complicated. And the only reason this election is even close, because there’s always been… I’ve been living in Brazil for over 30 years, there’s always been a percentage of the population that has fascist sympathies, far right sympathies. When I say fascist sympathies, I mean literal fascist sympathies. It’s not like calling an American politician a fascist or something. I’m saying that Brazil has a tradition of fascism that was manifest during the dictatorship. The reason that the election is close is because of the Silicon Valley tech fascists and political operatives like Steve Bannon who have been for years working with the Bolsonaros to use the same kinds of dirty tricks that Cambridge Analytica did to push toward Brexit in the UK, the same kind of tricks that were used to elect Trump and propel all of these other far right parties into power around the world, which is illegal data phishing or data access, purchasing data access from companies and micro targeting different demographics with emotional appeals and bringing people down rabbit holes on social media with conspiracy theories and whatnot to the point where a large percentage of the population is just scared and confused.

So this is why the election is close. The first round, some people expected Luma to win in the first round, some people expected Flavio Bolsnar to win in the first round.

You needed to get 50% of a vote plus one to win Brazil’s election in the first round because there were multiple candidates. Brazil has a multi-party system, there’s 29 political parties. Some people were expecting Lula to take it somewhere expecting Bolsonaro to take it. The polls put Lula two points ahead, three points ahead. Some of them had it tied. And in the end, Flavio Bolsonar won the first round by 1.8%, which sent out a big warning to different sectors of the population that might not normally support government as left wing as the Lula administration who are worried about the state of democracy in Brazil and also worried about sovereignty. So there’s been momentum growing on the streets. A few days after the October 4th first round election, Flavio Bolsonaro was pulling six points in the lead and that lead has evaporated now with most polls showing that they’re tied, some showing Lula a little bit in front, some showing Bolsonaro a little bit in the front.

The far right has a tradition of outperforming polls, so it’s basically up in the air right now with only a few days left until the election.

Michael Fox:

I think what’s interesting and important about right now, ahead of the first round vote, there was a lot of discussion about the role in the United States and the connection between the United States and Flavio Bolsonaro in the lead up going back months beforehand. And I dug into a lot of that stuff on this podcast. What’s interesting now is how much the conversation is really about Meta and about online manipulation, the algorithms, and that’s something I really want to talk about right now. We have been covering it constantly every day, numerous articles because it is a terrifying reality when you have a Silicon Valley company that is owned clearly by Mark Zuckerberg, that controls Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp and is very close friends with US President Donald Trump and is clearly trying to play politics in this election against Lula and his campaign. Brian, dive into where you see things with Meta right now.

How are they playing politics biased in this election? What have we seen?

Brian Mier:

Okay. Well, one of the reasons I enjoy being on podcasts is because normally news treats issues as almost binary things. So I want to avoid suggesting that it’s not the Trump administration, it’s not the US media in general, and it’s just Meta because there’s a long history of, for example, Elon Musk meddling in Brazilian politics and Donald Trump has made massive tariffs on Brazil and it’s basically extorting the population doing the same thing with the Biden administration did in 2024 in Venezuela saying, “If you vote for my guy, I will remove these punishments on you. Your economy will improve. I’ll remove the punishments.” Just like with Argentina in the midterm election, Trump said, “Well, I’m only going to bail out your economy if you vote for Malay’s party in the midterms. They maintain control of parliament.” So there’s that going on. Above and beyond that though, you have Meta.

So there’s a operative, a political operative who is in jail right now named Fernando Serimedo who was arrested for attempting to murder his pregnant ex-girlfriend who’s a lawyer in Bolivia recently. She’s now out of the hospital. She miraculously survived multiple gunshot wounds and she’s out of the hospital and she’s recovering and she’s talking to the media about what her husband was involved in. Now, we already knew that he was Miles’ big data manipulation guy, big social media manipulation, bot farm, merchant, controlling huge bot farms around Latin America. He was involved in influencing the Honduran elections, Peruvian, Colombian and Argentinian elections, and that he had close ties to both US intelligence agencies and the Bolsonaro family. But what she told Channel 14 in Mexico last week is that Fernando Cerameto and Flavio Bolsonaro’s brother, Eduardo, who is the CPAC representative for South America, visited Meta headquarters in the US and made a deal for the company to support Flavio Bolsonaro through algorithmic manipulation and to bury the reach of Lula during these elections.

And so there’s been a series of events that have shown that this is actually what they’re doing. First, a Brazilian journalist named Lais Gova spoke to someone inside Meta Corporation in Brazil who told her that right before election season started, Meta laid off most of its fact checkers and replaced them with an AI fact checking system that they believe was controlled from the US, which in itself is a crime in Brazil. Then both Amnesty International and the US NGO Echo ran tests with Meta platforms like Instagram and Facebook to see if they could break Brazilian election law by paying for advertising political ads from outside of Brazil. That in itself is a crime, but adding to that crime, the additional crimes of disinformation of the Brazilian electoral system, disinformation about the integrity of the electronic voting system, disinformation about the date of the election, and they paid for these ads and scheduled for them to run at a certain time and date so that they could cancel them if they were approved.

In the case of MSC International was from the UK, it was like 12 of the 20 ads that they tried to run made it straight through fact checking. And the aid that were rejected, they weren’t rejected because of the disinformation or the location, they were rejected for bureaucratic issues or something. They weren’t flagged as being fake content or something. And in the case of Echo, it was almost something like 17 out of 20 made it through. So they proved that Meta was breaking the law, allowing foreigners to take out campaign ads in Brazil. Then people started observing Meta’s AI that runs through its WhatsApp social media chatbot, and the AI was refusing to design logos for Lula, campaign logos or slogans or t-shirts or anything related to Lula. It was just refused. I said, “Well, I can’t do that.” But then it was designing them perfectly normally for Flavio Bolsonaro, and people began running all kinds of tests.

One example of something that was flagged by Lula’s campaign lawyers, his campaign team lawyers, was that one of the big accounts in social media supporting Lula is called Lula’s Troops. And so when you search for Lula’s troops in Meta AI, it gives you a link to a site called Flavio’s Troops. Or if you search for it in Instagram, I’m sorry, if you look for an Instagram, it would link you to Flavio’s troops. And if you try to make a hashtag with Lula, the first thing would come up would be lulathethief, whereas the hashtags with anything related to a negative portrayal of Flavio would only come in at the 18th or 19th hashtag that they would suggest when you’re trying to build a hashtag with Flavio Bolsonaro. And then on October 9th, Lula’s Instagram account was simply blocked from taking any kind of ads out for 24 hours, while Flavio’s was running perfectly normal, and Flavio’s allies were running propaganda for him like Nicholas Fajera was running perfectly normally.

So then once the page was reestablished, 24 hours later, Meta issued the statement very reminiscent of what they said, what Zuckerberg said when the Cambridge Analytica scandal surfaced saying, “Oh, I’m sorry, it was a technical glitch. We’re going to take measures to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again.” So yesterday, Folio de Saint Polo, Brazil’s largest newspaper, they uncovered conversations, internal conversations from workers in Meta headquarters in Brazil in which they acknowledged that they had been artificially promoting extending the reach of the Flavio Bolsonaro posts and limiting the reach of the Lula posts.

These conversations also showed that the international system crash, but Meta had give it as an excuse for Lula’s ads being taken offline for 24 hours, had actually happened on October 7th. I said October 7th, but this Lula’s page was taken on October 9th. The technical glitch that they used as an excuse for taking down Lula’s page had happened for five hours on October 7th, and Lula’s page was taken down for 24 hours on October 9th after they had fixed the supposed glitch. So these things, last Friday, the Superior Electoral Court issued an order for Meta to provide more transparency on how it’s using its algorithms and to immediately cease accepting money from third parties to propel propaganda for Flavio Bolsonaro and to reestablish equality and algorithm reach between the two candidates proportionate to their number of users and whatever. And on Monday, it was proven that they hadn’t obeyed the court order.

And so today, Tuesday, Lula’s campaign team filed a complaint with the Superior Electoral Court to cancel the presidential ticket of Flavio Bolsonaro because of illegal algorithmic manipulation. Remember that the first round was very close.

Nobody is suggesting that the reason everyone voted for Flavio Bolsonaro was because of algorithmic manipulation of Meta, but it could certainly make a two to three point difference, a four point difference in an election, and that’s what people are worried about. Will Flavio’s candidacy be canceled? Probably not, but at least it’s on record. The hope now is that since the scandals are broken, Lula’s reach has grown on social media and a lot of activists are trying to break the shadow banning using a lot of different tactics that they’re sharing with each other and everything. But the real risk is that on election day, we see that on the October 4th election day, Lula and Flavio Bolsonaro’s reach was about equal up until about 12 hours before the polling stations opened. At that point, suddenly Flavio had seven times more reach than Lula, and it maintained that way all through election day.

So the risk is that foreign media starts doing these stories about how finally the Brazilian leftists have woken up and figured out how to use social media, and they’ve evened out the playing field on this imaginary democratic commons, which is these fascist corporation controlled social media platforms. These kind of stories are already circulating, and then on election day, Zuckerberg can just turn off the Lula reach button again and really screw Brazil’s democracy over and the Amazon rainforest and everything else in this country.

Michael Fox:

Yeah. Brian, there’s that incredible table that this organization, it’s a statistical organization actually, but they put it together, this graph of what the reach looked like of the Flavio campaign and the Lulu campaign in the month ahead of times. It was just this incredible image of first, the Flavio campaign was consistently above the Lulu campaign throughout the campaigns itself. And then just like what you said, as soon as it gets close to the election, It just spikes and skyrockets. Flavio’s campaign just gets a ton, ton of reach. And not just the 12 hours before, I think it was even a couple days before, you can start to see it climb and compared with lulas. And it’s just this shocking thing. And I just want to underscore this fact that these aren’t conspiracy theories. When we start talking about part of the problem is the simple fact that the algorithm, we cannot know it.

It’s proprietary. They should share it. Meta should be sharing this. People should know what’s in it. But due to the fact that it’s actually hidden, it means that we can’t know what they’re doing, but we can see the results. And I think that’s what we see in concrete. And there’s been all of these studies and reports and statistics. There are different groups that are fighting really hard in recent weeks and in recent months to try and get all the statistics and see. In fact, there was one case where they had seen more than 1,000 different pro Lula accounts had been messed with, taken offline, blocked, suspended. And I think that it’s really important to just underscore the fact that this isn’t like suppositions. This is concrete, this is fact. It is happening. Meta is actually playing politics. They are messing with these elections, using the algorithm and using everything they possibly can.

I think what’s fascinating at the same time is how people have responded. You kind of mentioned it briefly, what they call here in Brazil get out of the bubble. Because what happens in the world that we live in now in social media is that if you love Lula, you’re going to be seeing all Lula content on Instagram. And if you love Bolsonaro and if you love the far right, you’re going to be seeing all Bolsonaro content. What has been interesting is that there has been Bolsonaro content that has been kind of feeding into the Lula feeds just in the last couple days and things constantly changing. But what’s been fascinating is to see how people have been trying to use different tactics to break out of that bubble, use the images and the color, green and yellow, which are the colors of Brazil in which Bolsonaro is embraced as his colors.

And so using those colors, doing memes, using the same memes. There was one case where they said, “Take a pro Bolsonaro meme, but then use AI to switch it around and make it pro Lula.” And so there’s been just this fascinating creativity, I think, by Brazilians in recent weeks to try and respond to the shadow bans, respond to the bias by Meta in these elections.

Brian Mier:

Yeah. But more than the internet, the Workers’ Party historically has always dealt with a highly, highly antagonistic press. I mean, there’s professional corporate funded lawyers like Glenn Greenwald who go around pretending that Brazil’s mainstream media likes Lula, but it doesn’t hold up to any kind of even mildly systematic analysis. There’s a media watchdog group at State University of Rio de Janeiro called which monitors all of the headlines about candidates and politicians and governmental figures and ranks them as positive, negative, or neutral coverage. And so one thing that stands out in my mind, I remember from when I was translating the biography of Lula was that during 2017, the most popular nightly news program in Brazil, Jonas Lacional, owned by a global company, they aired so much negative coverage of Lula that it could have filled up an entire month of one hour nightly newscasts just saying negative things about Lula.

Michael Fox:

Wow.

Brian Mier:

And they didn’t even allow his voice to appear on the network for 10 years at one point. Every time they showed him, they would show him, but his voice wouldn’t appear and there’d be newscasters paraphrasing what he said as he appeared on TV. And we’re talking about two time ex-president at the time. So the PT has always had ways of dribbling around negative coverage in media and even social media. And so a lot of the mobilization work for the vote is happening offline right now. And you can see that in the smaller towns where, for example, on Sunday in a town called Paldalio in Peralambugu population 52,000, over half of the population of the city, the town was on the street at Alula rally and that was not organized over the social media. That was organized knocking on people’s doors. Old technology like a car with a speaker driving slowly through the neighborhoods announcing the time and place of the march and all this stuff besides social media.

I personally don’t believe it’s possible, although it’s these examples of breaking out of the bubble are admirable and whatever. These multinational corporations, Zionist, far right white supremacist corporations are powerful enough to cut those kinds of activities off before election day.

It’s just this kind of glimmers. To me, it kind of plays into this glimmers of hope about the, look, the internet really is a magic tool for democracy. Look at how these wonderful young Generation Z people are breaking out of the bubble. That’s not the real fight. There’s no way. You might be able to break out of this bubble for six hours or something before their watchdogs cut it off. There’s no way that this can overcome the massive favoritism. The only way to overcome the massive favoritism of Meta is in the court system and enforcing existing laws and regulations. There’s no private sector solution for this problem. They have to be threatened with taking them down in Brazil, like the Brazilian government took down X. If they really wanted free and fair elections, they would turn off access to Meta and X three days before the elections and just say it’ll come back on Monday.

Michael Fox:

Yeah, absolutely, Brian. And I think this is just to underscore this point that as folks who are listening to this podcast and folks who are following the news at the Real News and elsewhere, Silicon Valley is very, very much in the pockets of Donald Trump and they have been fighting against legislation and regulation around the world. But in particular in Brazil, we even saw this just last year. Brazilian Congress was working toward potentially regulating social media and the big tech companies sent, I think there’s 88 different moments where they sent in lobbyists to lobby people in Brazilia. A third of those was by Meta. So they have been playing games in Brazil and paying attention to Brazil and definitely Elon Musk, all of this. So this is extremely important point, Brian, that there needs to be regulation for big tech. And I think that question of how people have responded in the streets in recent weeks has been really, really powerful.

And it hasn’t just been, “Oh, we’re going to go out in March,” but it’s been, “We’re going to go to March. We are going to talk to our neighbors. We’re going to pamphlet wherever we can. We’re going to go to places to try and get that 30 million people who abstain from the elections who did not vote. We need to get them in to vote. We need to encourage them to vote for Lula.”

Brian Mier:

Exactly. Now, just to add to your point, I was just giving a few examples of the illegal activity by Meta that’s been going on to favor a candidate who’s basically threatening a break with the democratic rule of law and establishing a state of exception if he takes power. Meta AI admits it itself. There’s a grad student named Laura Morgado who started asking Meta’s AI chatbot why Meta is backing Bolsonaro. And it answered, “Trump and the Bolsonaros are the global political shield for big tech companies against the advance of European regulation and the Latin American left in Meta AI chatbot’s own words.” They explain exactly why they’re doing this.

Michael Fox:

Totally. And this was so incredible because she posted it on Instagram and then we made an article about it for Pan-American Dispatch. And folks, just so you know, I’m going to be adding in links to everything that we’re talking about today in the show notes. So you can find almost everything that Brian’s brought up are articles that we have also been either translating or running and publishing. So this is all so you can have access to it all.

Brian Mier:

Yeah. So basically the tangent I went off on about Meta was based on seven… What we’re doing is we’re identifying the progressive news media outlets in Brazil’s most interesting articles, articles we think would be most interesting for a northern audience every day and translating them. And sometimes framing them with additional information that Brazilian readers would take for granted, but US readers might not know. So that whole sequence of things I said about Meta, we’ve got six or seven articles that described everything that I just said basically, and others that mentioned things I didn’t even bring up.

Michael Fox:

Yeah. Brian, I want to dive into the Superior Electoral Court, Casio Nunez, Andre Mendonsa. I think this is really important to understanding this moment because just for listeners, I did an episode a few months ago that was looking at Brazil’s fight against disinformation in the past. And the Supreme Court was one of the main places, the Supreme Court and the Supreme Electoral Court. Remember, the Supreme Electoral Court is made up of members of the Supreme Court and other institutions, Brazilian institutions. But basically the Supreme Court historically in Brazil has been extremely important in pushing back against the far right and against Bolsonaro, and particularly when he was in power. We saw a very big push in the last two elections from the Supreme Electoral Court pushing back against fake news that was actual fake news. I remember one moment, I remember there was some fake news that Hadaji had, who was the presidential candidate in 2018 when Lulu was in jail.

They said, oh, look at these cars. Look at this huge car he has and he lives in this mansion. It was all just ridiculous. But that was the type of fake news that they were pushing back at the time. But at this point, things are very, very different. Brian, can you explain a little bit about this?

Brian Mier:

Okay. Well, basically Brazil has very strict campaign regulations and to oversee the elections, the voting and enforcement of these regulations, there’s an electoral court system and the highest court in the system is the Superior Electoral Court. It has five justices. Three of them come from the Supreme Court on a rotating basis and two come from lower court like the Superior Justice Courts, which is another high ranked, high level court in Brazil. We’re in a situation right now where after eight years of international efforts supported even by mainstream media outlets in the United States to de-legitimize Brazil’s judiciary, we’re stuck with a superior electoral court that’s not up to the task of stopping Meta right now and the other social media corporations that are trying to throw the election for Bolsonaro. And to make things worse, because of the way that the system is rotating, every two years they change the president of the Superior Electoral Court and it’s kind of like in order that the justice was nominated to the Supreme Court.

So just by chance, by random chance, the president of the Superior Electoral Court right now is a man who was appointed by Jair Bolsonaro. So he’s not doing anything to try to slow down the disinformation being spread to support the Bolsonaro campaign.

Michael Fox:

Well, not just that, but he and the vice president, Andre Mendonso, is also appointed by Jair Bolsonaro. And in fact, they’ve been using their place in the court to stop and to block accounts in favor of Lula and to pull down a bunch of legitimate information that’s not fake news that has been published and spread and posted online. They’ve been actually using their place, not just to battle fake news, but actually to support the candidacy of Flavio Bolsonaro.

Brian Mier:

Yeah. And before, just to preemptively prepare ourselves for being accused of both sides in the issue, which is the way that Greenwald is gaslighting everyone on social media right now who’s complaining about censorship, an example of something that was censored, it was taken off the air by Nunez Marcus, Casio Nunez Marcus, president of the Superior Electoral Court, was a labor union posting information about how the economic policies of the two candidates would affect their labor sector, specifically how the budget cuts being promised by Flavio Bolsonaro, massive Javier Male style shock doctrine budget cuts would affect their labor sector with actual statistics, information from economists and whatever, that was taken off the air. When the Justice Department under Lula tried to pull down accounts that were violating Brazilian law by inciting support for Nazism, neo-Nazism, that’s when people like Greenwald Tucker Carlson started crying censorship and it made it into the New York Times.

But I didn’t see these guys complaining about unions being pulled off the air for legitimately expressing actual stats and projections about what would happen if someone was elected president.

Michael Fox:

Yeah, it’s a really concerning moment and it’s made more concerning by the fact that depending on who wins this election, there are four seats that will be open on the Supreme Court. So the Brazilian Supreme Court is 11 seats on the Brazilian Supreme Court. Two of them right now were appointed by Jair Bolsonaro during his term. Four of the seats are coming up for grabs over the next four years. It’s a very similar situation where we were like just before Trump’s first term. So if Jlavier Bolsonaro wins this election, it’s very likely that he will be able to appoint four new members of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court will then become majority for the Bolsonaros. And if you look at what the Supreme Court has meant historically in Brazil over the last decade as kind of the main bastion of the battle to push back on the undemocratic push, the authoritarian push by Bolsonaro, it is now going to be in the hands of the Bolsonaro family in the same way that Trump now controls the Supreme Court in the United States.

Brian Mier:

If the Supreme Court continues, because there’s a good chance that if Jair Bolsonaro gets power back, they’ll just implement a military coup. That’s what he was trying to do last time around when he was stopped.

Michael Fox:

Do you think that they would take it to that level, Brian?

Brian Mier:

Yes. This is what he’s been promising to do for his entire political career. Jair Bolsonaro, Flavio’s dad. For his entire career, he’s been promising to bring back a military dictatorship.

Michael Fox:

These are scary moments. What else do you think is important, Brian? And I want to talk a little bit about hope.

Brian Mier:

No, what’s important is that the huge wave of support for Lula on the streets led by young people shows that even if Flavio Bolsonaro is elected, it’s not going to be that easy for him. Remember, they had these… Jara Bolsonaro tried to start charging tuition at public universities and the national students unions historically connected with the Brazilian Communist Party and the teacher’s unions joined together to put over a million people on the streets in South Hollow on two different occasions with smaller but still very large protests in hundreds of towns and cities across the country and blocked Bolsonaro from doing that. They’re unable to block Bolsonaro from other things raising the retirement age. However, I get a lot of hope from talking to people at the rallies for Lula, and it’s a huge percentage of the population. It’s the majority of the population, the votes being manipulated, whatever.

But what we’re talking about is even if Flavio Bolsonaro wins by 1%, that still means that 74 million people in this country are leftists who support the left and are going to keep fighting. And you know what? Brazilians have a lot more experience operating under authoritarian regimes than Americans do in a sense.

So young people are talking to old people now, and I think that personally, I’m not moving out of here. If Flavio takes power, I’m not afraid. I know I’ll be okay because there’ll be so many other people supporting each other to fight these guys.

Michael Fox:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And what you said about the numbers in the streets is just, it is really incredible. There was over a million people that were marching in Sao Paulo just about a week ago. In many of these cities, we’ve seen some of the largest marches in a very long time, the largest student electoral march during election period here in Florianopolis. I mean, it’s been incredible and the amount of excitement and the amount of hope that people have. And like Brian said at the very beginning, that has dropped the numbers for Flavio Bolsonaro when he was maybe six points ahead of Lula just a few weeks ago following the first round vote, and now that’s decreased essentially to a tie, right?

Brian Mier:

And also it’s come out, Flavio’s under investigation for money laundering. He had some problems in the debate. There’s more and more dirt coming out in the mainstream media, so the tide seems to be turning right now. Who knows what will happen if Zuckerberg just turns off the Lula buttons on election day, but that’s why the street mobilization is so important because it can bypass having to rely on Silicon Valley to communicate with each other.

Michael Fox:

Yeah. I just want to underscore just part of why this election is so important right now is clearly the fact that for Brazil’s place in Latin America, what it represents is kind of this final bastion that hasn’t fallen to Trump and his people. I mean, one of the big things that, like I’ve talked about in this podcast, one of the big things that Flavio has mentioned many times is that the minute if he is elected, the minute he comes into power, he’s joining Trump’s Shield of the Americas, and he’s totally on board with just handing over the keys of Brazil to the White House and to more than the White House to the Trump administration. But I think what’s so important is clearly what Brazil represents in Latin America at this moment, but also the games that Meta is playing, this is not the only place it’s happening.

We saw in the United States just in the last couple days, the No Kings account was taken offline. A bunch of people and accounts supporting the No Kings demonstration in the United States in recent days have been taken offline or blocked or temporarily blocked.

We literally, our entire media sphere is controlled by a small number of very big outlets and they will not tell us how they’re controlling it. They are not sharing that information, and although they say that they’re being neutral, it’s not a reality, and we need to understand that. I think we need to look at Brazil and how people are trying to respond in Brazil to understand when these things are happening elsewhere, because this isn’t going away. It’s only going to increase. It’s only going to grow. The amount that people rely on social media for their news and information is only going to increase, and these companies are getting more and more powerful, and they’re ever more in the pockets of Donald Trump. This is a context that I think we really need to understand.

Brian Mier:

Definitely.

Michael Fox:

Brian, thank you so much, man. I really, really appreciate it. This was fantastic. Always great chatting with you.

Brian Mier:

Thanks for having me, and I will see you in Sao Paulo on Sunday, covering the elections.

Michael Fox:

That’s right. I will see you in Sao Paulo, and we will see all the rest of you online at panamericandispatch.org. Hi, folks. Thank you so much for listening. That is all for this episode of Under the Shadow. The second round vote of the Brazilian elections is this Sunday, October 25th. Please follow and subscribe to Pan-American Dispatch for everything on the elections. We’ll be doing live coverage of the vote throughout the weekend. Much of the reporting for this episode was based on stories that we translated and published with Pan-American Dispatch. I’ve added links in the show notes, or you can read and subscribe to the Substack at panamericandispatch.org. As always, you can find me at patreon.com/mfox.

There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of all the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. If you’re looking for more information, news, and reporting on Trump’s onslaught, both on communities within the United States and abroad, please check out The Real News and NACLA. Both of them are publishing daily indispensable reporting. The theme music is by my band, Monte Perdido. You can find us on Spotify or wherever you stream music. This closing song playing right now is off our 2024 album, Ofrenda. I hope you check it out. Under the Shadow is a co-production of The Real News and NACLA. It’s produced in partnership with Global Exchange. This episode was written, researched, reported, and produced by me, Michael Fox. Thanks so much to Brian Meer for joining me on today’s show. You can check out his Substack.

It’s called Delinking Brazil. Thank you so much for listening. See you next time.