Telegram inks deal with electoral authorities to curb fake news

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After narrowly escaping a ban in Brazil, Dubai-based messaging app Telegram agreed to terms with the Superior Electoral Court on a strategy to curb the spread of misinformation during the 2022 election campaign.

One of the fastest-growing apps in Brazil, Telegram is a go-to weapon for broadcasting political content — often laden with falsehoods as misinformation networks profit from the app’s almost-inexistent content moderation policies.

Telegram has committed to creating a tool to flag misinformative content, developing a chatbot to answer questions about the elections, and creating an official channel for the Superior Electoral Court. There will also be a direct communication channel between authorities and the company in order to quickly strike down flagged content.

As we showed in last week’s edition of the Brazil Weekly newsletter, far-right President Jair Bolsonaro has mastered the art of Telegram posting better than any other politician in Brazil. He manages roughly 10 times as many shares and views for his posts as Lula, his main challenger for the October election.

Amanda Audi

Amanda Audi is a journalist specializing in politics and human rights. She is the former executive director of Congresso em Foco and worked as a reporter for The Intercept Brasil, Folha de S. Paulo, O Globo, Gazeta do Povo, Poder360, among others. In 2019, she won the Comunique-se Award for best-written media reporter and won the Mulher Imprensa award for web journalism in 2020