Title reads 'Fighting Back Against Authoritarianism in Brazil'. Portrait photo of a Brazilian man called and text reads 'Ricardo Borges-Martins'. Text below his name reads 'Commons Librayr round up'. Logos of Australian Progress and commons social change library are bottom right. Top right is logo of 'FWD+Organise 2024'. There are coloured blobby shapes around the corners.

Fighting Back Against Authoritarianism in Brazil

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Introduction

Ricardo Borges Martins shares how organisers at the communications lab, Quid, used powerful organising and digital strategies to build civic engagement and overcome the far right in Brazil. Ricardo presented this case study at FWD+Organise 2024, a conference hosted by Australian Progress in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia.

Ricardo shares how communities in Brazil have been countering authoritarianism and misinformation through digital organising at an unprecedented scale. Ricardo leads digital strategy at Quid, a communications lab dedicated to engaging and informing civil society across Brazil. His team has created a digital network that reaches 25 million people through social media and operates WhatsApp groups with over 50,000 members actively involved in civic discussions – all without an email list. 

Below is a collation of lessons by the Commons librarians learned from Ricardo’s presentation with additional knowledge from two sources below by Pedro Telles, one of the co-founders of Quid alongside Ricardo.

Lessons Learned

Here are the lessons learned about how Quid used digital organising to overcome the far right in Brazil.

Research What Worked

The team at Quid studied the far right and found powerful infrastructure in Brazil dedicated to promoting ultra-conservative values. They researched how extremist communication channels worked so well and incorporated and adapted different strategies into their own work.

Extremists have worked out effective ways to share their views, and we need to learn from how they do it. Not to mimic their techniques of using fake news and other illegal or unethical practices, but the effective tactics and strategies that can be incorporated, adapted and improved without crossing red lines, and also to identify what sorts of regulations we need to stop their wrongdoings. – Pedro Telles, Source p. 16

The way it works — the way Bolsonaro built his ecosystem (and also Trump) — is that when a person opens their WhatsApp family group their uncle is going to be sharing something that came from the Bolsonaro group he belongs to, and they’re going to send that in the family group. Then, when you turn on the television, you’re going to be watching news, and someone is going to be saying the same thing on Fox News — or you’re going to turn on the radio and someone’s going to be saying the same thing on that radio show. And then, when you are in the street, there’s going to be someone talking about it as well. So, when you have this effect, where you’re getting multiple points of validation for the same subject, you figure it must be true — and you get influenced.  – Pedro Telles, Source

The Quid team did years of research, testing and experimentation.

We spent several months learning — literally reading Steve Bannon’s books and Dominic Cummings’s blog to see what those guys did. The one thing they’re very good at is explaining and teaching others from their field what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. They’re better than us at that. So we just spent some time studying those guys and also studying folks who had faced them in the U.K. and in the U.S. Then we spent several more months testing ideas, testing methodologies, testing technologies — before feeling confident that we were ready to make a meaningful contribution. So that was kind of a two-and-a-half-year cycle, until the election when Bolsonaro was fortunately defeated. – Pedro Telles, Source

Their research is onging and they are sharing it to enpower others such as with their website – Narrative Guides to Society’s Hottest Debates – How to Talk About – which is part of the Brief Project, a Quid initiative that aims to:

  • share communication intelligence to improve narratives,
  • map and anticipate communication strategies,
  • monitor investments in paid media and
  • democratize access to advanced research in communication and social psychology.

We want to empower progressive actors to communicate more assertively and influentially in the current political scenario. We believe that understanding the game better brings us a little closer to winning it. – Source

First Change the Culture

Their research revealed that they needed to focus on culture first. They used popular culture to reach people such as this example of their Twitter campaign ‘Assemble the Vote’ using celebrities in Brazil and big name international celebrities to get people to the polls.

Andrew Breitbart – “Politics is downstream from culture”. This Breitbart quote highlights the importance of cultural influence in shaping political outcomes – if you want to drive structural change in politics, you must first change culture. – Pedro Telles, Source p. 16

Focus on the Movable Middle

The Quid team designed campaigns not to be issue-centric but instead focused on audiences.

Different audiences are going to require different ecosystems. You’re not going to be able to build a single ecosystem that talks to everyone, because different people follow different things, and get informed through different channels. For effective advocacy, it’s essential to understand and segment audiences into the base, the middle, and the opposition. – Pedro Telles, Source p. 18

They focused on the Movable Middle – putting their efforts into persuading the undecided. 

We didn’t want to talk to people who were already convinced that far-right ideas or Bolsonaro’s policies were a problem. They’re already against it. We want to talk to the movable middle — people who were undecided. We did loads of research to find out who these audiences were, and also got information from research that was already out there. There were a few subgroups in society that were more likely to lean more towards progressive ideals and democratic values, even if they were not yet doing so. – Pedro Telles, Source

Meet People Where They Are

Their strategy was to meet people where they were at, such as using the channels the moveable middle were already using, e.g., TikTok, WhatsApp, YouTube, and Instagram.

So, at Quid, we were building campaigns that were both organically in the WhatsApp group, or through buying channels, or sometimes through hiring influencers for big pushes around critical things. We just built this ecosystem effect in which people were getting messages on their phone, on their Instagram account and through influencers talking about it — all at the same time. – Pedro Telles, Source

They researched trends and built audiences in social media on topics and themes people already were engaged with, such as celebrity gossip, entertainment and humour.

We monitor relevant topics and public reactions in real time, using various research methodologies. This allows us to understand how different audiences react to different topics, anticipate trends and arrive earlier and better at relevant issues…

We identify where the audience is and how they relate to different topics. From there, we go to where the audience is, delivering messages through multiple digital and offline channels, in the right way and at the right time. – Quid website, Source

Set Up Many Channels

They didn’t focus on one or two communication channels; instead, they set up building their own ecosystem, and today Quid has a digital network that reaches 25 million people through social media and operates WhatsApp groups with over 50,000 members.

…we started approaching pages with big followings on these topics in Brazil and asking if they would sell advertising on their page. Many people would say yes. Then we did a follow up question, which was, “Would you sell the whole page?” And many did. We learned that this is a new market, still informal in many ways, and it’s a growing market – already explored by the advertising industry and by the far-right as well. And so, in a relatively short time, we built an ecosystem with dozens of pages on different platforms, adding up to millions of followers. – Pedro Telles, Source

Here we were also emulating what the other side does because, today, the way you shape public opinion is not by having a single big outlet — it’s by having a coordinated ecosystem of channels. – Pedro Telles, Source

Share Your Narrative in Small Doses Amongst Other Engaging Content

Talk about politics without talking about politics. 

Ricardo used the metaphor of “putting the broccoli in the rice.” It’s about hiding the progressive narratives – ‘the good stuff – the broccoli’ – in places people already are (the rice) and just putting tiny bits of broccoli in for ‘the more it blends in with the rice, the better.’

Many of these channels are not primarily talking about politics or causes. They’re talking about what people in the middle are interested in – some channels talk about gossip and entertainment, others about humour and memes, and others about curiosities and trivia. This is where people who are in the middle, who are the people that we need to convince and to bring to our base, are going to engage. And what is done there is what we call “putting broccoli in the rice”: every now and then, political content is added to the posts, but maintaining each channel’s traditional language. – Pedro Telles, Source, p. 18

What we did is an approach called “putting broccoli on the rice.” These pages would continue to talk about gossip, celebrity news, whatever, but every five or 10 posts there’d be a post like this: “This celebrity is angry at the price of electricity” or “That celebrity broke up with a boyfriend because the boyfriend likes Bolsonaro.” This sort of stuff, and always real news and content that did not cross legal or ethical boundaries. Ensuring this is crucial for us not to make the problem worse. So you start putting political content inside the traditional content of the page, but only sometimes. You just start putting broccoli on the rice, and whenever you get closer to critical moments — like a crisis or the proximity of a voting date — you can increase the amount of broccoli without that becoming a problem to your audience, because the whole society is talking about that. There’s more space for you to push harder on this sort of stuff. – Pedro Telles, Source

Constantly Produce Content

Quid’s campaigns were always on. There was no deadline but constant production and distribution of content across many channels.

Build Followings, Not Petitions

Quid ran campaigns that asked people to join WhatsApp groups instead of signing petitions. 

But at Quid we had some campaigns that were very focused on building WhatsApp followings and Telegram followings. The main ask was: “Come and join this WhatsApp group.” It wasn’t: “Sign this petition.” It wasn’t: “Pressure this congressperson.” It was: “Are you also against this, or against Bolsonaro’s policies, or whatever? Join this WhatsApp group. We’re going to be organizing here.” So we started building some WhatsApp following through this, and eventually I had the opportunity to contribute to Lula’s campaign in the same way. – Pedro Telles, Source

Final Thoughts

Quid now has an audience of a massive scale – 31.4 million people following 82 brands, reaching 20 million impressions. Through the amazing and innovative work of Quid and Brazilian civil society this helped Brazilian society defeat Bolsonaro in 2022.

It’s important to remember that this struggle is not a fair or reasonable fight; it’s like “playing chess with a pigeon”: on your side you’re trying to follow the rules of the game, but on the other side is a pigeon – they are just going to fly away and s**t on your board. – Pedro Telles, Source p. 20

About Quid

“We are dedicated to developing actions, products and communication campaigns based on data and guided by a deep understanding of audience niches, contemporary digital culture and political situation. Our work consists of understanding audience behavior on networks and in the streets faster, creating more precise and powerful communication strategies, and taking messages further. We rely on constant experimentation and learning from data to create campaigns, messages and actions capable of reaching where others have not yet reached, and generating engagement and impact at scale.” – Source

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