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Jair Bolsonaro’s sweeping victory in the 2018 Brazilian elections took many people by surprise, within and outside Brazil. Yet from another angle, this success is just another chapter in a wider global story of radical right-wing populists rising to power over the past decade or so. Indeed, parallels between Bolsonaro’s political style and that of other leaders such as Donald Trump or Narendra Modi are striking, suggesting that their electoral efficacy may have stemmed, at least in part, from similar media infrastructures. Many scholars in anthropology and allied disciplines, myself included, have been following one clue in this respect: the increasing digitalization of electoral campaigns and of voter choice and behavior.
A long-time member of Congress from Rio de Janeiro who gained media visibility in free-to-air TV shows and on the internet by “speaking his mind” against political correctness and “breaking taboos” concerning military rule in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro ran virtually his entire 2018 presidential campaign on digital media. On Facebook, his personal page had more engagement than any professional media outlet. Bolsonaro, his family (three of his sons are also politicians), and others on the rising “New Right” became highly popular internet celebrities, boosted by supposedly spontaneous profiles and pages—some of which were recently removed by Facebook and Twitter—that helped spread the candidate’s word to virtually all segments of the Brazilian population. These profiles and pages did not deploy conventional political language, but rather the straightforward, fun, sometimes outrageous, and always charismatic language of internet and entertainment cultures. On the messaging app WhatsApp, official and unofficial pro-Bolsonaro content spread like wildfire, from large public groups of up to 256 users to people’s private groups and personal chats.
As the formal round of televised debates began, Jair Bolsonaro’s performance was ambivalent. Not as resourceful and professional as most of his adversaries, he claimed to be guided by three simple principles, which cameras captured written down on the palm of his hand: God, family, nation. Bolsonaro only attended the first such debates, however. In early September, one month from the first round of the elections, he suffered a knife attack during a street rally that kept him off the campaign trail for weeks. Yet it was precisely at this moment that his voter intention figures took off. How to make sense of this apparent paradox?
Bolsonaro’s bid worked not just due to a bold, ingenious digital communication strategy, but because the environment in which elections played out had changed. The 2018 elections took place in the aftermath of five years of deep political and economic instability in Brazil, fueled by massive antiestablishment protests in 2013 (see Dent and Pinheiro-Machado 2013) and one presidential impeachment in 2016 under corruption charges (see Ansell 2018). But something else happened during this period: the massification of smartphones and along with them the zero-ratings apps Facebook and WhatsApp. As one Facebook user put it bluntly as the prospect of Bolsonaro’s victory became unavoidable: what the legacy media and other political forces failed to understand was that for many Brazilians at that point WhatsApp was the internet. And this terrain had been virtually taken over by Bolsonaro.
The details of Bolsonaro’s victory unveil some of the deeper challenges that the mediatization of electoral communication on social media and associated voter choice and behavior pose to liberal democracies’ traditional model of political representation. In particular, it foregrounds the role of what scholars of new media have been calling context collapse: how “contextual porousness is exacerbated by the affordances of social media and the dynamics of networked publics” (Davis and Jungerson 2014, 479). While some convincingly argue that the colonization of all social spheres by neoliberal economic rationality sowed the seeds for the rise of illiberal politics in the West and elsewhere (see for example, Brown 2019), others foreground how digitalization furthered this process by collapsing key differentiations that sustained liberal democracy in the past: between public and private spheres; representative and represented; person and office; authenticity and fabrication; spontaneity and control; human and nonhuman agency; and between the spheres of politics, religion, science, economy, entertainment, kinship, and so forth (Chun 2016; Mirowski 2019).
Bolsonaro’s campaign claimed its impressive efficacy for being freely conducted by common citizens in street rallies and especially on online platforms that were popular at the time, including Facebook, YouTube, and WhatsApp. Ongoing electoral and criminal investigations in Brazil are showing that such efforts may have been boosted by an invisible influence operation led by digital communication experts in what the press has been calling a “hate cabinet.” The jury is still out as to who led and paid for such an operation, but both quantitative and qualitative evidence assembled thus far suggests that Bolsonaro’s social media campaign was not entirely bottom-up and organic (see Tardáguila, Benevenuto, and Ortellado 2018).
Politics and entertainment, fact and fiction, collapsed into a campaign where voters were called on by their peers to join in a life-and-death struggle to protect the country from a common enemy or to help Bolsonaro win what felt like a highly competitive FIFA World Cup final.
Analyses of metadata from pro-Bolsonaro public groups on WhatsApp conducted by multiple Brazilian research teams disclosed the operation of a multicentered, segmented network set up on the app in order to bulk-message unauthored and unreferenced memes, video, audio, long and short texts, and links to fishy “alternative media” sites paid for by interest-based ads (Machado 2018). Yet the architecture of such digital environments often made it difficult, if not impossible, to differentiate between authentic and automated behavior, spontaneity and manipulation. On Facebook and Twitter, bots spoke and behaved just like Bolsonaro’s followers, and vice-versa. On WhatsApp, context collapse between public and private, once pillars of the liberal public sphere, was especially disruptive. Users received a flood of supposedly spontaneous political memes, audio messages, and videos featuring ordinary folks from peers and private groups of family, friends, neighbors, and other personal relations. This was before the app started to flag “forwarded” messages, so it was often impossible to discern between original and shared content. Cryptography made sure peer-to-peer messaging was kept hidden from public view, while in practice WhatsApp operated less as a one-to-one private messaging app than as a kind of “dark” social media (Evangelista and Bruno 2019).
As with all populist leaders, Bolsonaro’s political communication also sought to collapse differences between representative and represented, leader and followers. Social media environments afford this unmediated effect; in fact, its marketing-based architecture is meant to do just that. Close, personal, even intimate relations between influencers and their fan base are a pillar of the contemporary influence industry. Today’s consumers (or more accurately, prosumers) no longer trust artificial, manipulative mass marketing; they want to make an “authentic” choice. The same holds for contemporary politics. Bolsonaro presented himself as a true embodiment of the Brazilian people, with all his flaws and incapacities, opposed to an elite of highbrow professional politicians and experts. He might not know much, but at least he was honest and authentic.
It was digital media that made this connection between populist leader and “the people” real. On WhatsApp, voters shared personal messages and demands requesting that they be forwarded “until it reaches the president’s smartphone.” On Facebook and Twitter, Bolsonaro made sure to respond directly to fans on a regular basis. In this, he was no different from other successful celebrities and digital influencers, who must continuously perform authenticity and spontaneity, regularly crowdsource content from followers, enact personal relations with them, and carefully manage the loop between self and fan base. To stay afloat in a highly competitive online attention economy, influencers must provide ever more new content to keep followers from disengaging. The pro-Bolsonaro campaign did just that, by providing a regular flow of entertaining content, and enveloping