With the stakes set high in its recent presidential election and amid predictions of election-related violence, Brazil’s electoral system stood out remarkably for treating democracy with the urgency and care it deserves. What can other democracies around the world learn from how Brazil handled its information landscape and voting?
Ahead of Brazil’s presidential election, many observers warned that Jair Bolsonaro was following Donald Trump’s playbook from 2020, sowing the seeds of doubt in the election process in order to claim it was rigged afterward. But instead, he accepted the loss. So were red-flag alarmists wrong to argue that Brazilian democracy was in danger?
In South America, Twitter has become an online extension of real-life political battlefields, and likely will remain so given economic forecasts for the coming year. That raises big questions over how Elon Musk’s ownership of the platform will affect how protests are organized, how governments respond and how disinformation spreads.