Revista Piauí - October 4, 2024
For two days in April this year, the team at NetLab – the Laboratory for Internet and Social Network Studies at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro – analyzed 90,000 publications in Portuguese and English posted on the social network X. All of them dealt with the dispute between Minister Alexandre de Moraes of the Federal Supreme Court and businessman Elon Musk, owner of X. NetLab concluded that around 40% of the publications had been sent by fake accounts. These were what researchers call “inauthentic profiles,” which do not necessarily belong to a real person. These are accounts that can make automatic or semi-automatic posts and that often act in a coordinated manner. In other words, they are posts by bots.
The inauthentic profiles unbalanced the game: 48% of the accounts that supported Musk against Moraes were fake. There were also fake accounts that criticized the businessman, but in a smaller proportion – 36% of the total. At the time, Musk had been accusing Moraes of censoring the social network by asking that extremist users be taken offline. The dispute – which would result in the suspension of X in Brazil on August 30 – was inflaming the far-right digital militia. And for those who were following the posts on X, Musk seemed to be winning the battle.