“Maybe I was blaming myself a bit, for leaving so many people vulnerable,” he said in a video interview with The Associated Press, with tears welling as he recalled his departure. “But what I did was right.”
Leal and his girlfriend of six years,
They also mustered a legion of enemies. Vitriol poured in, directed toward their account, Sleeping Giants Brazil. Believing their identities are soon to be revealed after a ruling against Twitter, they expect they will be personally targeted, for lawsuits or worse.
Fear their families would be caught in the barrage because they had often accessed the account at their parents’ homes, they say, is why they left their lives behind and are choosing to make their identities known to The Associated Press and Folha de
“Those threats that say, ‘I’m going to kill you,’ or, ‘I’m offering 100,000 reais (
This year,
Pursuit of Sleeping Giants Brazil is part of a growing trend over the last several years to instrumentalize the judiciary against those who train fire on conservative media outlets, interest groups and Bolsonaro’s administration, according to Taís Gasparian, a partner at law firm Rodrigues Barbosa,
Sleeping Giants Brazil followed the playbook of its US predecessor, which after Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential victory alerted companies to the fact their ads were appearing on websites including
The number of Sleeping Giants Brazil’s followers surpassed that of the US handle as it toppled one ad after another. A top
Scores of advertisers in
Jornal da Cidade claimed reputational and financial damages and sued Twitter, demanding the platform turn over data associated with the Sleeping Giants Brazil account that could identify its users. Twitter last week provided the court with the account’s I.P. addresses, according to a person with knowledge of the case, who isn’t authorized to speak publicly. Twitter said in an emailed statement that it “vigorously fought this case through several different appeals” and will continue to defend free speech and privacy rights.
Jornal da Cidade’s editor
“The cowardly attacks against Jornal da Cidade Online hide people, businesses and entities that certainly act in their desired attempt to install left-wing radicalism in
Danilo Doneda, a lawyer who specializes in data protection, told the AP that Brazilians are guaranteed freedom of expression, but the constitution has the peculiarity of prohibiting anonymity. Doneda, a member of the government’s newly-formed data protection council, likens Sleeping Giants Brazil to the pen name of an author known to his or her publisher.
“Twitter can gather the elements, technically, to reach these people, so it’s a pseudonym, not anonymity,” said Doneda.
Others have faced legal repercussions using their names.
Writer
Federal police interrogated cartoonist Renato Aroeira in July after depicting Bolsonaro as transforming a red cross representing hospitals into a swastika; the president had recently called on his social media followers to enter hospitals and film whether they were in fact overburdened with COVID-19 patients. And beach volleyball player
Polarization has taken root since Brazil’s sprawling Car Wash investigation that kicked off in 2014 and exposed rampant corruption, followed by President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment. The reason was violation of Brazil’s budget laws, but her Workers’ Party ascribed removal to political motives.
Into that political divide strode Bolsonaro, a fringe lawmaker claiming he would restore law and order to the beleaguered nation, put God and country above all else, loosen gun controls and banish left-wing politics.
His 2018 campaign was turbocharged by social media and messaging app WhatsApp. Media reported that executives had bankrolled blast messages on
One of the businessmen named in a story was
Throughout, Bolsonaro has denigrated mainstream media, often calling them “fake news.” In February, he repeated a debunked, sexually charged allegation about
Sympathetic conservative websites have consistently cheered him on. One is Jornal da Cidade, which the Atlantic Council’s
When Leal and Stelle successfully petitioned
Sleeping Giants Brazil targeted Jornal da Cidade early on, Stelle said, because of its coronavirus-related content. That has included touting chloroquine to fight COVID-19, an anti-malarial drug that Bolsonaro trumpeted despite a growing body of evidence that it is ineffective against the disease. In April,
The site published a story with the headline: “A catastrophic analysis about the vaccines against the Chinese virus: ‘They interfere directly in genetic material.’” It was debunked by two separate fact-checking groups, Agencia Lupa and Comprova, but not before racking up 191,000 interactions on Facebook. Jornal da Cidade replaced the story with a correction, which has garnered less than 3% as many interactions.
And ahead of this year’s municipal elections, Jornal da Cidade hosted six of the ten most-shared links on Facebook that encouraged Brazilians to believe in ballot fraud and election manipulation, according to a study published
Cristina Tardáguila, associate director of the International Fact-Checking Network and founder of Agencia Lupa, said Sleeping Giants Brazil was naive in not providing transparency and focusing efforts on one side of the political spectrum, which hurt credibility and handed ammunition to opponents.
“There was a certain naivete in thinking they’d be carried on the shoulders of the people, but Brazilians are ultra-polarized,” Tardáguila said. “Half the people wanted to do that, but half wanted to kill them, destroy them.”
She added she worried that the judiciary didn’t take into account the very real physical risk that the account’s administrators could face. The AP reviewed more than ten physical threats made publicly on Twitter. Jornal da Cidade hasn’t incited any violence against them.
Leal and Stelle aren’t sticking around to see if threats are mere bluster from keyboard warriors. They’re moving to their new home -- the location of which they declined to disclose – where they intend to keep working.
Jornal da Cidade is just one of the sites Sleeping Giants Brazil went after. Congresswoman
Leal and Stelle say they know their struggle is only beginning.
“We tried to prepare as much as possible for this. We’re betting everything on this project,” Leal said. “Demonetization of fake news means dealing with the worst of the internet: racists, xenophobes, and so on. From the moment you take the money away from these people, they never forget.” ___ Follow Biller on Twitter: @DLBiller
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