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COMMENT: In recent programs, we have examined the profound role of online technology in the promotion of fascism, as well as overlapping areas of intelligence activity. In that context, it is vital to remember that the Internet was developed as a weapon, with the focus of the technology being counterinsurgency. In Brazil, the rise of Jair Bolsonaro’s fascist government received decisive momentum from YouTube, which is transforming the political landscape in Brazil, as it is in this country.
“How YouTube Radicalized Brazil” by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub; The New York Times; 8/11/2019.
When Matheus Dominguez was 16, YouTube recommended a video that changed his life.
He was in a band in Niterói, a beach-ringed city in Brazil, and practiced guitar by watching tutorials online.
YouTube had recently installed a powerful new artificial intelligence system that learned from user behavior and paired videos with recommendations for others. One day, it directed him to an amateur guitar teacher named Nando Moura, who had gained a wide following by posting videos about heavy metal, video games and, most of all, politics.
In colorful and paranoid far-right rants, Mr. Moura accused feminists, teachers and mainstream politicians of waging vast conspiracies. Mr. Dominguez was hooked.
As his time on the site grew, YouTube recommended videos from other far-right figures. One was a lawmaker named Jair Bolsonaro, then a marginal figure in national politics — but a star in YouTube’s far-right community in Brazil, where the platform has become more widely watched than all but one TV channel.
Last year, he became President Bolsonaro.
“YouTube became the social media platform of the Brazilian right,” said Mr. Dominguez, now a lanky 17-year-old who says he, too, plans to seek political office.
Members of the nation’s newly empowered far right — from grass-roots organizers to federal lawmakers — say their movement would not have risen so far, so fast, without YouTube’s recommendation engine.
New research has found they may be correct. YouTube’s search and recommendation system appears to have systematically diverted users to far-right and conspiracy channels in Brazil.
A New York Times investigation in Brazil found that, time and again, videos promoted by the site have upended central elements of daily life.
Teachers describe classrooms made unruly by students who quote from YouTube conspiracy videos or who, encouraged by right-wing YouTube stars, secretly record their instructors. . . .
. . . . And in politics, a wave of right-wing YouTube stars ran for office alongside Mr. Bolsonaro, some winning by historic margins. Most still use the platform, governing the world’s fourth-largest democracy through internet-honed trolling and provocation. . . .
. . . . But the emotions that draw people in — like fear, doubt and anger — are often central features of conspiracy theories, and in particular, experts say, of right-wing extremism.
As the system suggests more provocative videos to keep users watching, it can direct them toward extreme content they might otherwise never find. And it is designed to lead users to new topics to pique new interest — a boon for channels like Mr. Moura’s that use pop culture as a gateway to far-right ideas.
The system now drives 70 percent of total time on the platform, the company says. As viewership skyrockets globally, YouTube is bringing in over $1 billion a month, some analysts believe.
Zeynep Tufekci, a social media scholar, has called it “one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”
Company representatives disputed the studies’ methodology and said that the platform’s systems do not privilege any one viewpoint or direct users toward extremism. However, company representatives conceded some of the findings and promised to make changes.
Farshad Shadloo, a spokesman, said that YouTube has “invested heavily in the policies, resources and products” to reduce the spread of harmful misinformation, adding, “we’ve seen that authoritative content is thriving in Brazil and is some of the most recommended content on the site.”
Danah Boyd, founder of the think tank Data & Society, attributed the disruption in Brazil to YouTube’s unrelenting push for viewer engagement, and the revenues it generates.
Though corruption scandals and a deep recession had already devastated Brazil’s political establishment and left many Brazilians ready for a break with the status quo, Ms. Boyd called YouTube’s impact a worrying indication of the platform’s growing impact on democracies worldwide.
“This is happening everywhere,” she said.
The Party of YouTube
Maurício Martins, the local vice president of Mr. Bolsonaro’s party in Niterói, credited “most” of the party’s recruitment to YouTube — including his own.
He was killing time on the site one day, he recalled, when the platform showed him a video by a right-wing blogger. He watched out of curiosity. It showed him another, and then another.
“Before that, I didn’t have an ideological political background,” Mr. Martins said. YouTube’s auto-playing recommendations, he declared, were “my political education.”
“It was like that with everyone,” he said.
The platform’s political influence is increasingly felt in Brazilian schools.
“Sometimes I’m watching videos about a game, and all of a sudden it’s a Bolsonaro video,” said Inzaghi D., a 17-year-old high schooler in Niterói.
More and more, his fellow students are making extremist claims, often citing as evidence YouTube stars like Mr. Moura, the guitarist-turned-conspiracist.
“It’s the main source that kids have to get information,” he said.
Few illustrate YouTube’s influence better than Carlos Jordy.
Musclebound and heavily tattooed — his left hand bears a flaming skull with diamond eyes — he joined the City Council in 2017 with few prospects of rising through traditional politics. So Mr. Jordy took inspiration from bloggers like Mr. Moura and his political mentor, Mr. Bolsonaro, turning his focus to YouTube.
He posted videos accusing local teachers of conspiring to indoctrinate students into communism. The videos won him a “national audience,” he said, and propelled his stunning rise, only two years later, to the federal legislature.
“If social media didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “Jair Bolsonaro wouldn’t be president.”
Down The Rabbit Hole
A few hundred miles away from Niterói, a team of researchers led by Virgilio Almeida at the Federal University of Minas Gerais hunched over computers, trying understand how YouTube shapes its users’ reality.
The team analyzed transcripts from thousands of videos, as well as the comments beneath them. Right-wing channels in Brazil, they found, had seen their audiences expand far faster than others did, and seemed to be tilting the site’s overall political content.
In the months after YouTube changed its algorithm, positive mentions of Mr. Bolsonaro ballooned. So did mentions of conspiracy theories that he had floated. This began as polls still showed him to be deeply unpopular, suggesting that the platform was doing more than merely reflecting political trends.
A team at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center set out to test whether the Brazilian far right’s meteoric rise on the platform had been boosted by YouTube’s recommendation engine.
Jonas Kaiser and Yasodara Córdova, with Adrian Rauchfleisch of National Taiwan University, programmed a Brazil-based server to enter a popular channel or search term, then open YouTube’s top recommendations, then follow the recommendations on each of those, and so on.
By repeating this thousands of times, the researchers tracked how the platform moved users from one video to the next. They found that after users watched a video about politics or even entertainment, YouTube’s recommendations often favored right-wing, conspiracy-filled channels like Mr. Moura’s.
Crucially, users who watched one far-right channel would often be shown many more.
The algorithm had united once-marginal channels — and then built an audience for them, the researchers concluded.
One of those channels belonged to Mr. Bolsonaro, who had long used the platform to post hoaxes and conspiracies. Though a YouTube early adopter, his online following had done little to expand his political base, which barely existed on a national level.
Then Brazil’s political system collapsed just as YouTube’s popularity there soared. Mr. Bolsonaro’s views had not changed. But YouTube’s far-right, where he was a major figure, saw its audience explode, helping to prime large numbers of Brazilians for his message at a time when the country was ripe for a political shift.
YouTube challenged the researchers’ methodology and said its internal data contradicted their findings. But the company declined the Times’ requests for that data, as well as requests for certain statistics that would reveal whether or not the researchers’ findings were accurate.
‘Dr. YouTube’
The conspiracies were not limited to politics. Many Brazilians searching YouTube for health care information found videos that terrified them: some said Zika was being spread by vaccines, or by the insecticides meant to curb the spread of the mosquito-borne disease that has ravaged northeastern Brazil.
The videos appeared to rise on the platform in much the same way as extremist political content: by making alarming claims and promising forbidden truths that kept users glued to their screens.
Doctors, social workers and former government officials said the videos had created the foundation of a public health crisis as frightened patients refused vaccines and even anti-Zika insecticides.
The consequences have been pronounced in poorer communities like Maceió, a city in Brazil’s northeast that was among the hardest hit by Zika. . . .
When Zika first spread in 2015, health workers distributed larvicides that killed the mosquitoes that spread the disease.
Not long after YouTube installed its new recommendation engine, Dr. Santana’s patients began telling him that they’d seen videos blaming Zika on vaccines — and, later, on larvicides. Many refused both.
Dr. Auriene Oliviera, an infectious disease specialist at the same hospital, said patients increasingly defied her advice, including on procedures crucial to their child’s survival.
“They say, ‘No, I’ve researched it on Google, I’ve seen it on YouTube,” she said.
Medical providers, she said, were competing “every single day” against “Dr. Google and Dr. YouTube” — and they were losing.
Mardjane Nunes, a Zika expert who recently left a senior role in the health ministry, said that health workers across Brazil have been reporting similar experiences. As more communities refuse the anti-Zika larvicide, she added, the disease is seeing a small resurgence.
“Social media is winning,” she said.
Brazil’s medical community had reason to feel outmatched. The Harvard researchers found that YouTube’s systems frequently directed users who searched for information on Zika, or even those who watched a reputable video on health issues, toward conspiracy channels.
A spokesman for YouTube confirmed the Times’ findings, calling them unintended, and said the company would change how its search tool surfaced videos related to Zika.
An ‘Ecosystem of Hate’
As the far right rose, many of its leading voices had learned to weaponize the conspiracy videos, offering their vast audiences a target: people to blame. Eventually, the YouTube conspiracists turned their spotlight on Debora Diniz, a women’s rights activist whose abortion advocacy had long made her a target of the far right.
Bernardo Küster, a YouTube star whose homemade rants had won him 750,000 subscribers and an endorsement from Mr. Bolsonaro, accused her of involvement in the supposed Zika plots.
The very people working to help families affected by Zika, their videos implied, were behind the disease. Backed by shadowy foreigners, their goal was to abolish Brazil’s abortion ban — or even make abortions mandatory.
As far-right and conspiracy channels began citing one another, YouTube’s recommendation system learned to string their videos together. However implausible any individual rumor might be on its own, joined together, they created the impression that dozens of disparate sources were revealing the same terrifying truth.
“It feels like the connection is made by the viewer, but the connection is made by the system,” Ms. Diniz said.
Threats of rape and torture filled Ms. Diniz’s phone and email. Some cited her daily routines. Many echoed claims from Mr. Küster’s videos, she said.
Mr. Küster gleefully mentioned, though never explicitly endorsed, the threats. That kept him just within YouTube’s rules.
When the university where Ms. Diniz taught received a warning that a gunman would shoot her and her students, and the police said they could no longer guarantee her safety, she left Brazil.
“The YouTube system of recommending the next video and the next video,” she said, had created “an ecosystem of hate.”
“‘I heard here that she’s an enemy of Brazil. I hear in the next one that feminists are changing family values. And the next one I hear that they receive money from abroad” she said. “That loop is what leads someone to say ‘I will do what has to be done.’”
“We need the companies to face their role,” Ms. Diniz said. “Ethically, they are responsible.”
As conspiracies spread on YouTube, video makers targeted aid groups whose work touches on controversial issues like abortion. Even some families that had long relied on such groups came to wonder if the videos might be true, and began to avoid them.
In Brazil, this is a growing online practice known as “linchamento” — lynching. Mr. Bolsonaro was an early pioneer, spreading videos in 2012 that falsely accused left-wing academics of plotting to force schools to distribute “gay kits” to convert children to homosexuality.
Mr. Jordy, his tattooed Niterói protégé, was untroubled to learn that his own YouTube campaign, accusing teachers of spreading communism, had turned their lives upside down.
One of those teachers, Valeria Borges, said she and her colleagues had been overwhelmed with messages of hate, creating a climate of fear.
Mr. Jordy, far from disputing this, said it had been his goal. “I wanted her to feel fear,” he said.
“It’s a culture war we’re fighting,” he explained. “This is what I came into office to do.”
‘The Dictatorship of the Like’
Ground zero for politics by YouTube may be the São Paulo headquarters of Movimento Brasil Livre, which formed to agitate for the 2016 impeachment of the left-wing President Dilma Rousseff. Its members trend young, middle-class, right-wing and extremely online.
Renan Santos, the group’s national coordinator, gestured to a door marked “the YouTube Division” and said, “This is the heart of things.”
Inside, eight young men poked at editing software. One was stylizing an image of Benito Mussolini for a video arguing that fascism had been wrongly blamed on the right.
But even some people here fear the platform’s impact on democracy. Mr. Santos, for example, called social media a “weapon,” adding that some people around Mr. Bolsonaro “want to use this weapon to pressure institutions in a way that I don’t see as responsible.”
The group’s co-founder, a man-bunned former rock guitarist name Pedro D’Eyrot, said “we have something here that we call the dictatorship of the like.”
Reality, he said, is shaped by whatever message goes most viral.
Even as he spoke, a two-hour YouTube video was captivating the nation. Titled “1964” for the year of Brazil’s military coup, it argued that the takeover had been necessary to save Brazil from communism.
Mr. Dominguez, the teenager learning to play guitar, said the video persuaded him that his teachers had fabricated the horrors of military rule.
Ms. Borges, the history teacher vilified on YouTube, said it brought back memories of military curfews, disappeared activists and police beatings.
“I don’t think I’ve had my last beating,” she said.
———-
Here’s an article about the ongoing role WhatsApp is playing in the radicalization of Brazil: David Nemer, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, has been studying the influence of social media in Brazil both during and after the 2018 elections. As we should expect, his findings are rather disturbing. While many of the people were actively involved in the various WhatsApp-based disinformation networks during the 2018 elections have subsequently left those networks after accomplishing what they wanted — getting Bolsonaro elected — there are plenty who have remained part of that disinformation infrastructure and continue to use WhatsApp to pull Brazil further to the far right.
Interestingly, Nemer has observed a schism within the pro-Bolsonaro forces on WhatsApp since the election in three distinct coalitions. When Nemer first started monitoring Brazil’s WhatsApp groups in 2018 he found four distinct groups. Those groups have now splintered into 10 different groups that fall under these three broad coalitions. One coalition, dubbed the ‘the propagandist’ coalition, are simply extremely pro-Bolsonaro and try to support his government in all ways. This has, of course, meant they rely heavily on outright lies and misinformation. But they also expend a large amount of energy attacking journalist and the media and generally promoting the idea that the only place Brazilians can get honest information is on WhatsApp. This group is like the Fox News of WhatsApp for Brazil.
The second coalition Nemer has seen emerge is the ‘social supremacist’ coalition. This coalition doesn’t actually care that much about what the Bolsonaro government is doing as long as the government supports far right social causes. This coalition shares lots of pro-gun, racist, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-Semitic content. This is also the coalition where Nazi propaganda and symbols, like Pepe the Frog, are commonly spread through memes and videos. They also point out manipulate photos of Brazilian leftists to suggest they are Communists or anti-Christian. So this is like the 4chan/8chan ‘Alt Right’ faction.
The third coalition, ‘the insurgents’ is perhaps the scariest group. This is a faction that has actually become deeply disenchanted with Bolsonaro...because they don’t think he’s extreme enough. The insurgents are disappointed he has added more generals to his cabinet and view an armed insurgency as the only way to completely ‘cleanse’ the government (of anything left-wing). This is the faction that basically wants a return to Brazil’s military dictatorship.
So the legion of pro-Bolsonaro WhatsApp users that got him elected has fragmented into groups that are largely supportive of what Bolsonaro is doing and a faction that thinks he’s not nearly far right enough. It gives us an idea of what’s next in WhatsApp’s radicalization of Brazil:
“Now, eight months into Bolsonaro’s presidency, WhatsApp is still serving as a largely hidden platform for the radicalization of right-wing Brazilians, even as Bolsonaro’s once-united base has splintered into separate, and often competing, factions. And Brazil is feeling its effects.”
A splintering of the previously united pro-Bolsonaro far right WhatsApp movement. That’s what David Nemer has observed as he continued monitoring Brazil’s WhatsApp groups following the election of Bolsonaro. There’s the Fox News-style Bonsonaro loyalists dubbed ‘the propagandists’ who will spread whatever disinformation is necessary to support Bolsonaro on a daily basis. And a big part of messaging from this coalition is the message that all other news is ‘fake news’ and Brazilians can only get the truth from them:
Then there’s the ‘social supremacists’ who appear to largely be ‘Alt Right’ neo-Nazis and incels mostly just focused on spreading socially conservatives memes and neo-Nazi propaganda. Two followers of this coalition when on a shooting spree at a school this year:
And then there’s the scariest faction: the ‘insurgents’ who view an armed takeover of Brazil and mass purging of society. They basically want a return to the dictatorship years:
“These groups, too, have made their voices heard outside of WhatsApp. They have been instrumental forces behind protests that have called on Bolsonaro to shutter Brazilian Congress, shut down the country’s judiciary and even return to military rule — an indication of how radical Brazilian discourse has become under a president who himself has long celebrated the country’s deadly and oppressive military dictatorship.”
And that’s just what David Nemer has been able to observe. There’s presumably quite a bit of Brazilian far right activity over WhatsApp he hasn’t been able to monitor.
So these factional fights within Brazil’s far right will be something to watch. Except, of course, we won’t actually be able to watch most of it because it’s all taking place largely in secret on encrypted apps like WhatsApp. Although we do get to see these fights manifest in the real world, like when there’s a protest calling on Bolsonaro to return to military rule. Along those lines, it’s worth keeping in mind that WhatsApp isn’t just useful for spreading misinformation and radicalizing people. The cell-like structure of these WhatsApp disinformation networks would presumably be pretty useful for orchestrating some sort of mass armed neo-Nazi insurgency too. Hopefully that isn’t the next phase of the radicalization of Brazil but we’ll see.