The Brazilian left beat the far-right at their own game

On Monday, Brazil’s elections ended in a shocking loss for the far right. Wannabe autocrat Flàvio Bolsonaro, son of wannabe autocrat and former President Jair Bolsonaro, got more votes than incumbent president Luis Inácio “Lula” da Silva on October 4th. But the vote went to a runoff, and Da Silva won in the second round. As usual when a far-right candidate loses, the younger Bolsonaro has tried to claim victory — from Miami, where he’s totally not avoiding corruption charges with help from his political allies in the Trump administration. ChatGPT is also involved somehow.

Meanwhile, Da Silva’s come-from-behind victory has its own tech angle. A group on WhatsApp, Brazil’s most popular social platform, is getting a lot of the credit for mobilizing left-wing voters. They pulled it off with an unusually deep online social strategy, something we’ve seen from crypto scams and incel influencers. But the strategy isn’t new at all — for either of the country’s major parties.

The WhatsApp channel “Exército do Lula” (“Lula’s Army”) was created in April by André Janones, a member of congress who had endorsed da Silva. Janones was known for getting social media attention — he reportedly broke records in 2022, when he got 3.3 million views on Facebook Live — but he had less success supporting Da Silva. The group reportedly had around 60,000 followers by the first round of elections on October 4th.

On October 5th, on advice from Janones, Da Silva posted a vertical video excitedly speaking to his selfie camera. The video was a big deal even before it gained a reported nine million views in a few hours across multiple platforms. The president had never had this kind of personal social media presence before (Janones recently convinced him to buy a cell phone). But what happened next was even bigger.

Janones and the rest of the social media team supporting da Silva’s new efforts were really smart posters. The Exército do Lula channel became the spearhead of a much more systematic and strategic operation than Joe Biden listlessly ranking the Kelce brothers on an app he outlawed. Da Silva and his Workers’ Party (PT) had been dealing with the combination of far-right politics and tech giants for long enough to not only understand their tactics, but borrow them.

To talk about this, we have to explain the Brazilian web a little. The country is extremely online in a specific, concentrated way. It is both a social media test kitchen of sorts, getting platforms and features earlier than most countries, and, also completely dominated by Meta. The company has its fingers in more or less every single social interaction in Brazil, since WhatsApp is a universal “everything app” and Instagram and Facebook are almost as popular. That’s meant the company has faced an unusual amount of scrutiny, especially from Da Silva’s government, which proposed sweeping regulations after Jair Bolsonaro’s hyper-online “Bolsominions” attempted a coup in 2023 when he lost the presidency to da Silva. Meta was able to stop the law from passing, but it’s meant their fortunes are a lot more directly tied to the Bolsonaro family.

The Brazilian far right dominated the conversation on social media this year, especially on Meta platforms. The country’s biggest newspaper, Folha, found that Meta AI programs built into the app would generate content supporting Bolsonaro and his Liberal Party (PL), but not da Silva’s PT. They also reported that right-wing WhatsApp posts had almost double the reach of left-wing ones. Brazil’s Supreme Court was able to order Meta to alter their algorithms, after internal documents showed Meta knew they were prioritizing Bolsonaro. Meta claimed they weren’t doing it intentionally, but they didn’t need to. They just weren’t stopping Bolsonaro’s supporters from using every single growth hack at their disposal. 

Their strategy centered on a WhatsApp channel called Direita Já (Already Right). The channel’s official website has been registered since 2025, but wasn’t active until earlier this year, and claims to have tens of thousands of active members. The channel is, essentially, a right wing content farm. Members of the channel are given a package of premade, frequently AI-generated posts and videos. Every day, members get new “missions” telling them what to post where, hoping to create trends for the algorithm to boost further. Completing enough daily missions gets you into an official partner program. Bolsonaro’s most ardent supporters tried a version of this in 2018, as well, seeding Instagram memes on WhatsApp for users to screenshot, post, and even AirDrop to people’s phones. [Ed. note: This happened to Ryan on a flight to São Paulo years ago. Whole plane got AirDropped by a Bolsominion.]

Direita Já’s gamified growth strategy isn’t new outside of the US, either. It’s the reason you know who Andrew Tate is, after his “Hustlers University” site charged a legion of boys to post him to the top of TikTok. We covered it again in 2024, when a crypto-focused clicker game called Hamster Kombat used a similar strategy in a Telegram server. It got attention on the game, boosted its token and — briefly — took over X and YouTube in the process. But until now, we haven’t seen any signs of a similar strategy used by any group as serious and official as a major political party.

In August, Da Silva’s party coalition officially called on Brazil’s Supreme Court to investigate Direita Já, claiming the channel was being illegally advertised by official funds from the Bolsonaro coalition. It also claims their mass-produced posts violate laws against disinformation that were passed after the 2022 election. So far, the investigation seems to be ongoing, but their efforts to stop the practice have been complicated by the fact they’ve been trying to copy it.

The first attempt at a left-wing version of Direita Já was called “Porto-Vozes de Lula” (Lula’s Spokespeople), which launched over the summer. It's also been under investigation since before Direita Já was, but it’s had a lot less effect. Without their opponents’ paid advertising or support from enormous far-right influencer/politicians, it doesn’t seem to have done much to address Meta’s algorithmic slant against their content. You can swim upstream against the current of the feeds, but it takes a lot of organic attention.

Luckily for Da Silva, the sprint of a second round election runoff gave him all the attention he needed. Exército do Lula had a similar gamified “posting mission” strategy to both Direita Já and Porto-Vozes de Lula, but it was more popular by orders of magnitude: By election day on October 25th, the channel had almost 11 million members. After Da Silva was elected, he thanked Janones, the app’s “general” who personally assigned missions to its “soldiers”.

The Lula’s Army WhatsApp group wasn’t the only reason he won the election. Da Silva was supported by everything from from student protests to workers’ rights campaigns — but the strategy winning is sending a clear message to every other democracy that has to reckon with social media algorithms (i.e. all of them). If the most underhanded, scummy tactics are allowed within the laws of the nation and the terms of service for the platforms that mediate all of its culture, then they can be used both ways.