In October 2018, just over a week before the presidential election that would cement Jair Bolsonaro’s rise to power, Brazil’s newspaper of record Folha de S.Paulo published an exposé on his campaign’s allegedly illegal use of WhatsApp to spread false news stories about his opponent Fernando Haddad.
The author of the story, the award-winning journalist PatrĂcia Campos Mello, woke up the next day to a barrage of online threats against her and her family. The attacks never stopped: To this day, she remains the target of what is possibly the largest online harassment campaign against a single person in Brazil. Despite the abuse, Campos Mello, who has covered presidential elections from the United States to India, has continued to report on the dark underbelly of Brazilian politics.
Campos Mello’s new book A Máquina do Ódio (The Hate Machine) explores the rise of disinformation in Brazil—and how to prevent it from happening again. She spoke with Foreign Policy both about her personal experience and the broader problems confronting media in her country.
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