The inner workings of pro-Bolsonaro misinformation networks

On July 8, Facebook Inc. announced it had taken down a network of social media profiles owned by figures linked to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and two of his sons, who are also in politics. The justification for the removal was that these profiles engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” which violates the company’s terms of use. Combined, the pages and profiles in question had an audience of more than two million accounts.

The network comprised 14 Facebook pages, 35 personal accounts, 38 Instagram pages, and one Facebook group. Beyond being linked to advisors of the First Family, the accounts acted to spread positive information about this political group, promoting themselves and the Bolsonaro administration. The problem is that they did so illegally.

Facebook explained the network as “consisting of several clusters of connected activity that relied on a combination of duplicate and fake accounts — some of which had been detected and disabled by our automated systems — to evade enforcement, create fictitious personas posing as reporters, post content, and manage pages masquerading as news outlets.”

The social network defines inauthentic behavior as when “people misrepresent themselves, use fake accounts, artificially boost the popularity of content, or engage in behaviors designed to enable other violations under our Community Standards”. 

In partnership with Facebook, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab had the chance to analyze the content and behavior of these accounts before they were taken down. Luiza Bandeira, research associate and Latin America head of the lab, points out that the network had been in operation since at least the presidential campaign of 2018.

“According to Facebook, this network engaged in non-authentic behavior, using fake or duplicate accounts. People who do not exist, pictures of Twitter users in Turkey, profiles that pretended to be ordinary citizens and posted messages of...