Voter fraud and questioning elections in Brazil: multi-platform analysis of political actors, conspiratorial bias and content moderation

Abstract

This paper investigates the presence of actors, conspiracy and moderation in online content with unfounded allegations of electoral fraud published during the 2020 municipal elections in Brazil. The study is based on the understanding that the intensification of conflicts between political elites influences the political system, and consequently the stability of democratic institutions and norms. The article uses a corpus of 1,426,687 posts from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to examine the position of influence of those who post about electoral contestation. The objective is to understand the spread of these contents between media and the characteristics that give them a conspiratorial appeal. The paper shows that this agenda is mobilized by politicians and other opinion leaders of the radical right. The vast majority of this content is based on political opinion, without mentioning sources, and is eminently conspiratorial in nature.

Electronic voting machine; Conspiracy theory; Cross-platform analysis; Elections; Brazil