The next speakers in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference are the great Marie Santini and Debora Gomes Saloes, whose focus is on anti-sustainability narratives in messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. The environmental agenda in Brazil is highly polarised especially also because of the power of the agribusiness sector; this sector has an interest in environmental deregulation because of its impacts on the environment. How do these actors support discussions in WhatsApp and Telegram groups in Brazil to spread anti-sustainability discourses, and what problematic content is spread in such platforms?
Marie’s Netlab has monitored such public groups on the two platforms, which were also instrumental to Jair Bolsonaro’s electoral success, since 2021; this used a large number of key terms to discover climate-related messages, and focusses for this paper especially ion the period between January 2023 and March 2024. After filtering, some 87,000 messages linking to more than 1,000 domains remained.
The team also performed topic modelling on these messages, as well as qualitative framing analysis, and a study of the links included in these messages; these links were also cross-referenced with their targets to determine the topics of the content being linked to.
Key topics included attacks on the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), which is large in Brazil but frequently attacked by right-wing and far-right groups because of their connections to the Lula government; attacks on Lula government policies, in part also for the increased level of forest fires during Lula’s first administration; conspiracy theories targeting government institutions over COVID-19 policies, population control, and climate change policies; defence of the agribusiness sector from supposed threats by Lula government policies (even though this is the most subsidised sector of the Brazilian economy); attacks on NGOs supporting climate change and Indigenous people; claims that Bolsonaro’s policies supported the environment and Indigenous people; the Ukraine war, its impact on the global fertiliser market, and the consequences for Brazil; and reports about forest fires (though generally without much disinformation or political stance-taking).
These discussions are unevenly distributed, and variously peaked in relation to external political events; many links shared in such posts were to social media and junk news sources. Minor news brands were especially prominent in agribusiness and Ukraine war discussions, in part also because many such minor and local news brands are highly supported by powerful local politicians and agribusiness interests. Disinformation on climate change in Brazil is therefore highly connected with powerful commercial interests.
