Brazil Has A Plan To Combat The Right Wing's Unreality
Brazil's government is trying something weird: Being proactive about election misinformation.
I thought it'd be a bigger deal.
A month ago the Brazilian government refused visas for U.S. State Department officials who had come to the country purporting to observe preparations for Brazil's October 2026 presidential election. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, said no, absolutely not, you're here to fuck with our elections, not observe them. Get out, he said.
The State Department and Trump regime officials vehemently denied all that and cast Lula as paranoid and unwell. They seemed bothered – almost annoyed – that Lula and those close to him had seen through their bad-faith reason for visiting the country ninety days before the son of the fascist who lost to Lula in 2022, Flavio Bolsonaro, vies for the presidency. When his sickly papa was easily defeated four years ago, he staged a violent coup that included an attack on the seat of Brazil's government. Maybe you're familiar with such post-election loss tactics.
Denny Carter
Pro-democracy leaders in countries throughout the world, including in Germany and Mexico, have warned of the Trump regime's disturbing interest in their voting machine technologies and electoral systems as elections approach. Dispatching officials to Brazil a few months ahead of Lula's re-election attempt – with a Trump-aligned candidate facing him – is a reminder that these guys are on one big, democracy-destroying team. It's why JD Vance – a rabid backer of Germany's fascist parties – scurried to Hungary in a last-minute attempt to goose dictator Viktor Orban's chances before he got his ass stomped by a reform candidate who now pledges to leverage state power against Orban and his kleptocratic allies.
Lula and many of Brazil's high-profile judges seem to understand the right wing game plan better than most, and certainly better than pro-democracy leaders in the United States. Unlike in the US, they throw their coup doers in prison. They seem to get that the goal for the international fascist movement, of which the current U.S. government is a part, is to raise questions and sow doubt about the legitimacy of their opponents when those opponents win elections; that doesn't happen during or after Election Day, it happens before.
Once those doubts are properly seeded, and once the political elite and political press engage with these doubts as reality, the game is over. Democracy has lost.
The right's unreality creation, Lula understands, can't be given any oxygen, and cannot be ignored like so many elected Democrats in the US appear to believe. For as soon as the right's unreality – their version of events – finds a crevice and sneaks into mainstream discourse, it becomes the equal and opposite of Actual Reality, as legitimate and accepted as the real events. This national leader says the election was fair and free, this one says it was rigged. That's the news for tonight.
MUST BE GODDAMN NICE
— Denny Carter (@dennycarter.bsky.social) September 11, 2025 at 7:03 PM
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It was nice that the 2020 American election was not overthrown, that the winner of the presidential election was certified and sworn in. What was less nice: More than half of Republicans still believe the 2020 election was stolen by shadowy left-wing forces. Two-thirds of so-called MAGA Republicans say Big Boy had his re-election bid stolen from him. Trump had lost – a fact his judicial nominees either can't or won't acknowledge. The right's unreality had won.
The Lula administration's war against the international right's election unreality doesn't end with booting Marco Rubio's stooges from the country. Brazil's government, which has been at the forefront of recognizing the existential danger of Elon Musk's fascist propaganda platform, recently unveiled a new instrument for holding accountable the social platforms that foster and encourage the spread of the misinformation and disinformation campaigns hatched by right-wing actors. The country's Electoral Court, a pain in the ass of Big Tech for quite a while now, is forcing social sites with more than 5 million users to tell the Court how they plan on combatting election lies in the run-up to the 2026 showdown between Lula and the fashy Bolsonaro kid.
Per Tech Policy Press:
In an unprecedented measure, platforms will have to provide comprehensive and structured information on how they monitor, address and counter disinformation, coordinated inauthentic behavior and AI-generated political content. ... The new mechanism could shift the logic from this reactive stance to a more proactive posture focused on preventing and mitigating risks.
The Electoral Court's plan would (try to) accomplish something that is hardly even discussed in the United States: Democratizing these massive digital town halls whose algorithms are determining the rise and fall of politicians and political parties and entire empires. The Court's decree, according to Tech Policy Press, would allow "journalists and civil society organizations an unprecedented window into platforms’ methodologies and moderation efforts during elections. "The decree divides the plans between a public layer and a separate, more detailed, layer" that offers ready access to how these black box algorithms operate.
Dusty Schmidt
How Brazil's Electoral Court will enforce these preemptive attempts to stop widespread election lying before it starts remains vague for now, two months ahead of Election Day. One punishment for social platforms that refuse to comply with the new measure would be a total ban on political advertising – an enormous source of revenue for Meta and X, among other sites.
How foreign this must sound to American ears. Our government is deporting researchers who so much as talk about studying Musk's X platform while Brazil's government is getting ahead of what will surely be a far-right attempt to steal the 2026 election. Our government works hand in hand with the trillionaire owner of the world's most important social platform while Brazilian officials threaten to ban the explicitly anti-democracy site that both normalizes and promotes authoritarianism across the world. Our government needs the world's largest social platforms to continue letting lies run wild across their sites, into the brains of political leaders and voters and even non-voters. It's the only way to pump oxygen into the alternate reality the right needs to take hold as agreed-upon reality.
Lula and much of Brazil's judiciary seems to understand there are ways to prevent this oxygen from being released, that there are ways to "red-team" the vulnerabilities of democratic institutions before they're attacked. Meta and X as they're currently run are utterly incompatible with representative democracy. Brazil seems to get that. Hopefully, one day, American leaders will too.
Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
