New research from the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) assesses the strategies that newsrooms have adopted in order to navigate the whirlwind of manipulation, misinformation and disinformation that has shaken the foundations of trust in Brazilian institutions since former President Jair Bolsonaro’s election in 2018.

Brazil is one of five countries in focus for ICFJ’s Disarming Disinformation project, which is researching editorial responses to disinformation and audience attitudes to news organizations targeted in disinformation campaigns. To conduct this work, members of our team were embedded in newsrooms in Brazil, Georgia, the Philippines, South Africa and the U.S. over the past 18 months.

In Brazil, ICFJ researchers were embedded with the country’s most influential newspaper, Folha de S. Paulo, and Tapajós de Fato, a small nonprofit digital news outlet based in the Amazon region. 

In parallel we conducted public opinion polling in the five countries studied to understand perceptions of disinformation, the safety of journalists, and the role of public interest media in each country.

This extract from our new Disarming Disinformation report on Brazil focuses on Tapajós de Fato, which operates in a high-risk context in Pará, a vast northern state. To reach some of the remote communities that Tapajós de Fato covers, our researchers took boats up the Amazon.
 

Read the Report

 

Brazil’s disinformation landscape

When Brazil banned X (formerly known as Twitter) for 40 days in 2024, it drew global attention to efforts by the world's fourth-largest democracy to tackle disinformation in the context of a coup attempt that former president Jair Bolsonaro stands charged with plotting, along with 33 allies. 

But political disinformation is not the only threat to democratic deliberation and the Brazilian public’s right to access credible information. Health and the climate agenda also remain strong disinformation currents. 

And in the precious Amazon region, disinformation narratives that benefit extractive industries dominate. Our analysis here highlights Tapajós de Fato’s approaches to covering a vast region centered on the municipality of Santarém, in a high-risk context, with almost no resources. Santarém is part of the Amazon region, which is home to most of the world’s parcels of biodiversity, and yet has been exposed to increasing agro-extractive activities in recent years, alongside threats to journalists and activists seeking to protect the environment. 

Disinformation as a form of violence against journalists 

Violence against journalists in Brazil is one of the main challenges to press freedom and democracy, contributing to the absence of media outlets in thousands of Brazilian cities. The situation is even more hostile in the Amazon. Between June 30, 2022 and June 30, 2023, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) recorded 66 attacks on the press across the nine states of the Legal Amazon (Amazônia Legal, as the region is called).

These included severe incidents targeting the team at Tapajós de Fato, which was founded in 2020. Since 2021, the independent media outlet’s co-founder Marcos Wesley has faced various forms of intimidation, such as being followed on the streets of Santarém and having his car tires slashed in an act of sabotage and intimidation. On one occasion, Wesley found a severed cat's head and a threatening note in the front garden which he shares with his mother. This gruesome incident prompted him to relocate to the state capital, Belém, to protect himself and his family. 

In 2022, their equipment was stolen, and one of their reporters was injured with a knife just meters from the outlet's former office. Alongside disinformation narratives intended to discredit their reporting, Tapajós de Fato’s journalists often face instances of online violence, including cyberstalking. 

A recent case involved Tapajós journalist João Paulo de Souza after he released a video of himself interviewing Santarém residents about the social and environmental impacts of the Ferrogrão railway project, which affects protected areas, including Indigenous lands and conservation units. The video was shared by right-wing blogs in the region, exposing the reporter’s private social media accounts, and triggering a wave of ‘virtual lynching’. 

“I was terrified and had anxiety attacks. I stayed home for at least six days; I didn’t leave the house,” recalls Souza. “Since working as a reporter, I did not visit my mother, who lives nearby, for a year; I want to protect her and my entire family.”

Due to security concerns and a lack of resources to ensure journalist safety, Tapajós de Fato decided not to cover the 2024 municipal elections. As a result, voters in the state of Pará, particularly those in the municipality of Santarém, were deprived of Tapajós de Fato's coverage regarding which candidates supported or opposed the agendas and rights of Indigenous people and traditional communities in the region.

Indeed, the experiences of the Tapajós de Fato team confirm a global trend reported by UNESCO in May 2024, showing that, over the last five years, there was a significant rise (+42%) in attacks against journalists covering a range of environmental topics (protests, mining, land conflicts, extreme weather, pollution and the fuel industry). As some experts and reporters pointed out, the killing of British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous journalist Bruno Pereira in 2022 in the Amazon region “sent shockwaves” through Brazilian media outlets. In this context, Amazônia Real, an award-winning independent, investigative, nonprofit journalism agency, decided to implement new protocols, such as avoiding nighttime travel and providing health insurance.

The vulnerability of independent journalism in the Amazon region of Brazil, which is exacerbated by targeted disinformation campaigns that expose reporters to greater risk, remains a threat to  the plurality of voices in the country’s media landscape.

Read the Report

Countering disinformation by challenging neutrality and ‘bothsideism’ 
 

But while disinformation-laced attacks on Tapajós and its journalists have limited their ability to operate, they have nevertheless pushed ahead with innovative forms of counter-disinformation work, characterized by deep community engagement and rejecting the strictures of false balance. 

They combat disinformation by rejecting the premise of journalistic neutrality and pursuing cause-oriented journalism without the obligation to present “both sides” of an issue, as though they are equal when they are not equally valid or factual. This helps avoid the trap of effectively empowering disinformation narratives by giving unnecessary credit to their proponents, or enabling the profit-seeking spin of multinational corporations seeking to cleanse their negative reputations with regard to environmental stewardship. 

“Sometimes, when a local media outlet publishes a story praising a multinational company for bringing a lot of progress to the Amazon, we expose the impact on the well-being of the original communities,” says co-founder Isabelle Maciel. “We hear from the population affected by these projects, offering a counter-narrative.” 

Disinformation extraction 

According to Tapajós de Fato´s team, two types of disinformation stand out in Santarém: narratives that frame the lands of traditional communities as unproductive to justify their seizure by mining and agribusiness corporations; and narratives that blame NGOs for criminal activity in the region.

One of these cases occurred in the area of the Agro-extractive Settlement Project Lago Grande, a project established in 2005 which covers 250,000 hectares. In this settlement, 144 traditional communities—approximately 35,000 people—live sustainably by extracting forest resources. 

Tapajós de Fato surveyed residents to identify the area's main products of family farming, the benefits of community-based tourism, and other sources of income for the local economy to counter disinformation narratives serving extractive industries that suggested that these communities were “unproductive.” As a result, they launched the campaign “PAE Lago Grande Produces, Yes,” along with a podcast in which residents speak about their communities. They also created a glossary to help both newcomers and outsiders understand the approach to sustainable farming in the area.

Health-related disinformation also plagues traditional communities in northern Brazil. It was especially widespread during the COVID-19 pandemic but it has continued to gain traction in subsequent years, affecting vaccination campaigns and other public health efforts. 

But this exposure isn’t limited to communities with ready access to the internet. “Certainly, what shocks me the most is seeing that even in communities or places without internet access, there is still a strong presence of disinformation,” Tapajós de Fato’s co-founder Wesley said. “A practical example that collectively impacted us and triggered one of our campaigns was when we realized that [COVID-19] vaccination rates were very low in the Baixo Amazonas region, specifically in quilombola [settlements first established by escaped slaves in Brazil] and extractive communities." 

Collaboration and discussion circles as offensive strategies 
 

In response to these challenges, Tapajós de Fato has chosen collaboration as a strategy to fight disinformation. One of these projects, "Popular Communication and Health: Debunking Myths in the Tapajós and Baixo Amazonas Territories," was developed in partnership with the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), to provide traditional communities with reliable information about the importance of vaccination and the Unified Health System (SUS). The content was tailored to the local context and delivered offline, but also in the form of booklets shared through discussion circles in rural communities, Indigenous villages, and quilombolas.

Additional strategies included forming partnerships with local community radio stations and producing audio content distributed on USB drives sent by boat to offline communities, allowing the information to be played over loudspeakers. To tackle climate disinformation, the collective hosted immersive, active listening sessions with groups of five to 15 community members to better understand the environmental changes residents perceived and how these impacted their livelihoods.

“Everyone sensed that something was happening,” Wesley said. “People complained that it was getting hotter, that the açaí was drying up earlier than usual, and that trees like andiroba and copaíba weren’t producing the same oil. Everyone knew something was off, but no one could pinpoint it. That’s when, while speaking with a partner, the idea came to me to create booklets for community-based discussions built around the impressions and perceptions of residents.”

These questions resulted in a series of booklets on climate change, written in accessible language and reflecting the communities' knowledge. The initiative also included workshops to discuss these topics, with the booklets distributed in public schools throughout the project area. The aim of introducing these initiatives to community schools was to teach children about climate change through day-to-day experiences such as açaí collection.

What can we learn from Tapajós de Fato’s experience?

Our work suggests that combating disinformation in Brazil—a wildly diverse, continent-sized country—requires combining innovative strategies, challenging traditional editorial guidelines, and developing new distribution methods to reach low-connectivity communities, particularly vulnerable to baseless claims.

Despite increasing hostility and a reduced team compared to 2022, the Tapajós de Fato team continues to access and gain recognition and respect for their journalistic work from various traditional communities and territories within the Amazon. This recognition is a crucial factor in enabling the production of investigative reporting in the region and fostering participatory communication projects with local communities. Such achievements are made possible by the team's deep-rooted connection to the region, as all members were born and raised in Amazonian territories, and by their clear editorial stance: a commitment to defending Indigenous territories and traditional communities while critically addressing the development paradigm.

However, for a fledgling and vulnerable news website such as Tapajós de Fato, the absence of financial stability, and a dearth of grants to provide safety and technical support and training makes it hard to continue their work to promote critical thinking about climate disinformation. 

It is essential that governments, intergovernmental organizations and civil society collaborate to ensure the safety and security of small editorial teams risking their lives in the Amazon region – the frontline of the struggle against climate-related disinformation.  

Read the Report

Top findings from Disarming Disinformation Brazil
 

1. Disinformation is a feature of violence against Brazilian journalists, in particular those who challenge and expose false narratives, which fuels an environment of risk. Coordinated disinformation campaigns routinely involve smears against journalists designed to undercut trust in their factual reporting, exposing them to increased risk. 
2. Counter-disinformation efforts including investigations, election coverage and work to protect journalists under attack are hindered by shortcomings in the outlets’ security protocols. 
3. Disinformation campaigns that target journalists in the Amazon region, where the practice of public interest journalism is already precarious, exacerbate this vulnerability representing a threat to media plurality in Brazil.
4. Disinformation narratives framing the lands of traditional communities as unproductive to justify their seizure by mining and agribusiness corporations dominate in the Amazon region, along with false narratives blaming NGOs for criminal activity 
5. Tapajós de Fato’s innovative counter-disinformation work is characterised by ‘deep listening’ and meaningful community engagement, emphasising issues and communities not covered by mainstream outlets. 
6. Going low-tech is a necessary strategy to reach low-connectivity communities vulnerable to disinformation.
7. The majority (58%) of Brazilian adults express a high level of concern about encountering false or misleading news according to our representative survey.
8. Nearly three quarters (74%) of Brazilian adults reported encountering attacks on news organisations of journalists that seemed intended to undermine their credibility.
9. 65% of Brazilian adults see attacks on journalists by senior politicians or government officials as a major threat to media freedom. Yet 17% considered such attacks only a minor threat and 8% did not see them as a threat at all.

You can read the full set of findings and recommendations in the Disarming Disinformation: Brazil report, which is available here. Learn more about our Disarming Disinformation research here.

DISCLAIMER: Primary funding for this research was received from the Scripps Howard Foundation as part of ICFJ's Disarming Disinformation project, with additional support provided by the International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM) and the Gates Foundation.