2023 and the belief in a communist Brazil – 07/07/2023 – Education

“The communist menace is an adult-oriented version of the ‘bag man’.” This phrase is part of a meme that has been widespread in recent election periods, being updated with each election to satirize the “fake news” that the left is plotting a coup to install such a regime in the country. As the power of a good meme lies in synthesizing reality in a comic and sagacious way, this scenario is not fanciful: more than half of Brazilians really believe in it.

A survey released this month by Datafolha shows that 52% of voters totally or partially agree that Brazil is close to communism. The percentage is higher than that published by Ipec in March, when the institute revealed that 44% believe that the “communist specter”, to paraphrase Marx and Engels, “surrounds” Brazilian society.

What at first may seem comical, since it has no basis in the current socio-political context, is nonetheless worrying. As much as the percentages of the surveys match the rates of valid votes in the last election, in which the campaign of Jair Bolsonaro, a defeated candidate who has been spreading anti-communist rumors for years, obtained 49.1% of the electorate’s preference, it is necessary to go beyond the possible correlations.

Combating misinformation when the facts simply don’t matter is perhaps one of the greatest challenges of our times. As much as the “fear of communism” is not exactly a novelty in Brazil –the months of the João Goulart government that preceded the 1964 military coup are a good example of this supposed threat–, we live in a moment in which the scale of conspiracy ideas gained immeasurable proportions. Moreover, these narratives do not just appear on the eve of the elections: they are promoted and disseminated continuously – just remember other viral content on this topic, such as the Ursal meme, from 2018.

We still lack an understanding of how to act and what to do with the emotional impact that misinformation has on certain groups, since what we see as detachment from reality, practically half of the country sees as probability. In other words, tackling the different confirmation biases in heterogeneous audiences is a major obstacle to creating strong and effective actions.

As much as more transparency is demanded from digital platforms regarding the functioning of algorithms and, consequently, about the emergence of information bubbles and echo chambers, the propensity to believe in what matches our political values ​​and ideological worldviews will continue to be a preponderant factor for lying content to be validated and shared by us, regardless of whether they are true.

Several researchers suggest, as a way, the consumption of information from various sources, from different editorial lines, to mitigate possible radicalization of thought and viralization of lying and anti-democratic messages. In this sense, public policies of media and political education are important for the development of awareness about our own cognitive biases when evaluating information beyond its source, reflecting on its potential connotations and contexts.

There is no single solution to such a complex problem in a society like ours, where elements such as religious diversity, low education, historical ignorance and unequal access to information and technologies are part of the disinformation broth – even because conspiracy theories are driven and disseminated also by the elites. But we need to face the fight against disinformation seriously, adopting educational and accountability measures for those who create these messages with the intention of causing social disturbances, if we want, in fact, to make the informational environment healthier and less neurotic about totally unlikely political ghosts. .