Electoral Disinformation on Digital Platforms: The Case of the Spy e-Título

Abstract

Based on a clarification note published on the “Fato ou Boato” (Fact or Fake) portal, the article presents an investigation into a controversy involving an application published by the Brazilian Electoral Justice and the permissions required by it for its installation. Theoretically, the text starts from the concepts of disinformation and electoral disinformation, relating them to platform and algorithm studies and presents the proposal of digital methods, used in the analyses. It seeks to answer several research questions: What was the impact of the investigated case on Twitter? How many people tweeted about it, and how many retweets did they get? How many retweets did the posts with the TSE checks and the fact-checking agencies receive? Where did the retweets who shared the video come from? What medium did the people who shared the video use? How do people who shared the video describe themselves? The analysis of tweets collected about the controversy demonstrates how posts with disinformation content circulated far more than official and agency publications. It was also possible to determine the location of users, the majority being in Brazil and that the cell phone is the most used means to republish disinformational content. Finally, analysing the biographies also allowed us to trace a political affinity of the people who shared the disinformation with the Bolsonaro government.