Efforts made by fossil fuel companies and other actors with vested interests in the energy sector to shape the public’s understanding of the climate crisis, the energy transition, and their possible solutions have been documented worldwide, spanning communication campaigns, research funding, lobbying, and direct engagement in policymaking. Rather than promoting the scale of structural change required by the climate crisis, high-impact energy companies have increasingly invest

Taylor & Francis The enforced demise of Clyde Miller’s Institute for Propaganda Analysis—shut down in 1942 under accusations of communist sympathy and insufficient loyalty to the American ideal—resonates today amid coordinated campaigns to silence disinformation researchers. This essay examines these campaigns, focusing particularly on Brazil. It begins by situating disinformation research within a matrix of democracy and autocracy, arguing that under current conditions, disi

Data from 2026 indicate that becoming a victim of an online scam — that is, losing money over the internet or through a mobile phone — is among Brazilians’ main concerns, surpassing worries associated with urban violence. Electronic fraud already surpasses robbery in the number of reported cases in Brazil and finds its main channel for reaching victims on social media platforms. The Pix Scams study, conducted by cybersecurity company Silverguard, found that 79% of reported fi

Generative artificial intelligence has made it easier to produce and disseminate non-consensual intimate images, exacerbating sexual violence against women due to the low cost, widespread availability of these tools, and the ease with which images can be distributed across digital platforms. In recent years, NetLab UFRJ has identified the promotion of fraudulent and abusive advertisements on social media platforms, which profit from their distribution and expand their reach t

Fraudulent advertisements can be understood as a disinformation strategy based on paid content and social engineering techniques to generate revenue, causing financial and reputational harm to users. On social media, this type of advertising often relies on sensationalist language, promises of unrealistic results, prices or discounts far below market value, and AI-manipulated images. Scammers also create fake profiles that imitate official pages or pose as qualified professio

Applied Network Science This paper examines political communication on Brazilian X/Twitter during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, a period marked by tensions between federal authorities, state governors, and media actors. We consider how the platform reflects the circulation of policy-related narratives, including controversial positions such as early treatment with hydroxychloroquine. To support the analysis of large-scale interaction data, we construct a retweet

Political Communication Report The current digital architecture is largely grounded in data regimes, sociotechnical ecosystems that regulate the relationship between digital infrastructures, our online footprint, and private appropriation of public data. Under the current data regime, public social media data is not a freely accessible digital common (Fuster Morell, 2010) but part of broader digital enclosures through which technological corporations extract and fence off com

Taylor & Francis Tech oligarchy arises when platform companies are dominated to a singular extent by a small group of very powerful and extremely wealthy men who have played uniquely influential roles in structuring technological development … that align with their personal beliefs and who now wield unprecedented informational, sociotechnical, and political power. (Cohen, 2025) Cohen’s landmark intervention refracts a contemporary zeitgeist of elite capture in which concentr

Nos últimos anos, o Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF), especialmente na figura de seus ministros, tornou-se um dos principais focos do debate político online no Brasil, refletindo a crescente polarização em torno de temas sociais e institucionais. As plataformas de redes sociais, especialmente por meio da publicidade paga, passaram a desempenhar um papel central nesse processo, permitindo que diferentes atores ampliem o alcance de campanhas, narrativas e disputas em torno da Cor