L’analisi di Kevin Poireault in Infosecurity: The US Midterms and the Brazilian presidential election have shown, once again, how rife misinformation and disinformation are during democratic elections. Several human rights groups and researchers claim that social media platforms struggled to follow through on agreements they signed with Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE) in February 2022, in which they promised to combat material that could undermine the democratic process. “On election day, and as the vote counting was underway in the following days, posts and videos containing misinformation and allegations of election fraud began to circulate on social media. [But] when it comes to electoral fraud, platforms have widely different policies, and even the stronger ones aren’t always enforced [and] tech platforms have a track record of bending their rules for powerful actors, and allowing politicians to get away with speech that violates their policies,” Human Rights Watch’s Deborah Brown, senior researcher on digital rights, and Maria Laura Canineu, said in a post on October 28, 2022.
