Disinformation-laced attacks on journalists and public interest media are now a key plank of the 21st-century authoritarian playbook. Political actors instigate narrative capture by seeding widespread distrust in facts. Disinformation and distrust in facts are then “viralized” by Big Tech companies’ platforms and technologies, infecting the information ecosystem, with serious consequences for every democracy.
ICFJ’s Disarming Disinformation project has mapped this playbook in five countries — Brazil, Georgia, the Philippines, South Africa, and the U.S. As part of this process we have studied emblematic news outlets’ innovative counter-disinformation work up close, and we’ve conducted public opinion polling in the five countries to help us understand how these attacks affect perceptions of journalists and public interest media in each outlet. We want to understand how truth tellers can fight back more effectively.
This month, we published the first study from this project — Disarming Disinformation: Brazil. This vast country, which is still recovering from the autocratic presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, can be seen as a beacon for creative approaches to defending information integrity amid a sea of lies.
For this study, members of our team were embedded with the country’s most influential newspaper, Folha de S. Paulo. And they traveled up the Amazon by boat to reach communities covered by Tapajós de Fato, a small digital news collective to learn how counter-disinformation efforts work to reach remote communities.
Among our key findings: In the context of anti-press smear campaigns, inadequate security protocols hinder efforts to conduct investigations and elections coverage, escalating the risks faced by journalists. In small independent outlets, in particular, journalists often lack adequate physical, legal, and psychological protection to deal with hybrid attacks.
“I was terrified and had anxiety attacks. I stayed home for at least six days; I didn’t leave the house,” recalled Tapajós de Fato journalist João Paulo de Souza. “Since working as a reporter, I did not visit my mother, who lives nearby, for a year; I want to protect her and my entire family.”
But the journalists at Tapajós de Fato persist, despite the serious risks. They pursue radical collaborations with community organizations designed to deepen their impact and build trust among traditional Amazonian land stewards, who find it difficult to access credible information, making them more susceptible to disinformation. These communities are also targeted with disinformation narratives, framing them as unproductive, which are seeded by corporations that want to seize the lands they occupy.
Similar approaches to community-building through novel media literacy activities are in play at Folha, alongside pioneering Big Tech accountability reporting. Their methods include monitoring whether online platforms follow their own rules (where they still exist) for moderating disinformation, tracking the progress of regulatory and lobbying efforts, and directly addressing disinformation sources. “Should we also check what the platforms are doing about it? What does the law say about it? How is it going viral?” Folha’s Campos Mello asked, explaining that they don’t stop at seeking to understand the political context of disinformation. “Another thing that we monitor is which public figures are specifically spreading this disinformation content.”
Our national opinion poll, conducted in August 2024 with a base of 1,003 participants, revealed that the majority (58%) of Brazilian adults were highly concerned about encountering false or misleading information. This finding indicates an opportunity for targeted editorial interventions that address this heightened concern. But it also highlights the need to help the sizable minority that is not so concerned understand what is at stake.
Complicating these efforts is our finding that 74% of Brazilian adults had encountered attacks on journalists or news outlets that seemed intended to undermine their credibility. This signals significant exposure to smears designed to undercut trust in factual reporting and informed commentary. Perhaps this helps explain why a third (33%) of Brazilian adults did not consider political attacks on journalists a significant threat to media freedom.
So, in addition to media and information literacy interventions, meaningful community engagement, and investigative reporting focused on exposing disinformation campaigns, and their instigators and vectors, editorial efforts that help people understand the risks at the intersection of democracy, media freedom and disinformation are essential.
Six findings from Disarming Disinformation: Brazil
(1) Disinformation is a feature of violence against Brazilian journalists, in particular those who challenge and expose false narratives, which fuels an environment of risk.
Coordinated disinformation campaigns routinely involve smears against journalists designed to undercut trust in their factual reporting, exposing them to increased risk. Our interviewees described threats of physical violence, attacks on their property and pets. This physical threat is fueled by pervasive anti-press narratives, smear campaigns and technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV).
(2) Avoidance of ‘bothsidesism’ and the act of ‘calling a lie a lie’ are deployed as counter-disinformation strategies.
There is a move to reframe the concept of objectivity to avoid false balance in coverage, and examples of new editorial guidelines which employ more “honest” language, such as describing the act of politicians deliberately sprouting falsehoods as “lying.”
(3) Tapajós de Fato’s innovative counter-disinformation work is characterized by ‘deep listening’ and meaningful community engagement, emphasizing issues and communities not covered by mainstream outlets.
This effort is operated by journalists born or raised in the Amazon region. They used their connections with social movement leaders to tackle climate disinformation by hosting immersive and active listening sessions with community members to understand the environmental changes residents perceived, and how these impacted their livelihoods.
(4) Diversified counter-mis/disinformation strategies are more effective than isolated approaches.
Connecting editorial strategies, partnerships, innovative content distribution methods and media literacy activities can be essential to tackling disinformation in a continent-sized country with a highly diverse population, many of whom live in remote areas. Strategic partnerships with universities or civil society organizations, for example, can fill resource gaps.
(5) Going low-tech is a necessary strategy to reach low-connectivity communities vulnerable to disinformation.
Tapajós de Fato distributes audio content on USB drives by boat to offline communities in remote areas. Forming partnerships with local community radio stations in the Amazon region allows the information to be played over loudspeakers.
(6) Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs are a feature of counter-disinformation strategies.
These range from implementing internship programs to address the lack of non-white journalists in newsrooms, to building teams entirely composed of people born in the territories covered by the newsroom. When news outlets’ staff reflect the diversity of the communities they serve, they are more likely to be trusted.
In total, we identified 19 key findings and 15 recommendations for action in Brazil. Explore the findings and recommendations in detail here.
Our Disarming Disinformation research received primary funding from the Scripps Howard Foundation, alongside support for public opinion research via the International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM) and the Gates Foundation. Our studies are published in partnership with City University.
Disarming Disinformation researchers Nabeelah Shabbir, Waqas Ejaz, Kaylee Williams and Nermine Aboulez contributed to this article.