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- Tunisia voting ends as Saied eyes re-election with critics behind bars
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- Postecoglou slams 'unacceptable' Spurs after 'terrible' loss at Brighton
- Marmoush double denies Bayern outright Bundesliga top spot
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- Drowned by hurricane, remote N.Carolina towns now struggle for water
- Vikings hold off Jets in London to stay unbeaten
- Ahead of attack anniversary, Netanyahu says: 'We will win'
- West Indies cruise to T20 World Cup win over Scotland
- Arshdeep, Chakravarthy help India hammer Bangladesh in T20 opener
- Lewandowski's quickfire hat-trick powers Liga leaders Barca to Alaves victory
- Man Utd fire another blank in Aston Villa stalemate
- Lewandowski treble powers Liga leaders Barca to Alaves victory
- Russian activist killed on front line in Ukraine
- Openda strike briefly sends Leipzig top of Bundesliga
- Goal-shy Man Utd have to 'step up', says Ten Hag
- India bowl out Bangladesh for 127 in T20 opener
- Madueke rescues Chelsea in draw with 10-man Forest
- Beckett's belief rewarded as Bluestocking storms to Arc glory
- Trump on the stump, Harris hits airwaves in razor-edge US election
- Flash flooding kills three in northern Thailand
- Kaur leads India to victory over Pakistan in Women's T20 World Cup
- Juventus held by Cagliari after late penalty drama
- In France's Marseille, teen 'stabbed 50 times' then burned alive
- Ruthless Gauff beats Muchova in straight sets to win China Open
- India restrict Pakistan to 105-8 in Women's T20 World Cup
- England target repeat of Pakistan Test whitewash
- Penrith Panthers win fourth straight NRL title after downing Storm
- Weary Sinner happy for day off after battling into Shanghai last 16
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- Madrid's Carvajal to miss several months after serious knee injury
- Israel pounds Lebanon ahead of Hamas attack anniversary
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- Toddler among 4 dead in migrant Channel crossings
- Tunisia votes with Saied set for re-election
- Bagnaia sets 'example' with Japan MotoGP win to cut gap on Martin
- Intense Israeli bombing rocks Beirut ahead of war anniversary
- Mozambique vote: no suspense but some disillusion
- Austrian rapper channels anti-racist rage in Romani hip-hop songs
In Brazil, Lula fights to boost social media presence
At a bar in Brasilia, two longtime members of Brazil's Workers Party retweet messages supporting Luis Inacio Lula da Silva on their cell phones, as part of his campaign's drive to fight the overwhelming presence of President Jair Bolsonaro on social media.
"We will not stop. Our battle, too, is online," said Ze Augusto, a retired professor, looking at his screen.
With a little more than four months to go until Brazil's presidential election, Lula, 76, has a comfortable but declining cushion in the polls.
But on social media he is far behind in popularity to the far-right president, who will probably be his opponent in a run-off on October 30.
When Bolsonaro came to power in 2018, a key tool in his victory was an adept social media campaign run by his son Carlos. It was based on propaganda, disinformation and the political destruction of opponents.
Since then, Bolsonaro has remained strong on social media, boasting a total of 47.5 million followers on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Telegram and TikTok. That is triple what Lula has.
Lula, who served as president from 2003 to 2010, does not use a cell phone and has taken part in five election campaigns in which social media did not yet exist. His aides decided months ago to go on the counterattack online.
It raised the number of messages the campaign sent and the interactions on its accounts. It also created profiles on new social media like TikTok and won support from famous people in Brazil like the singer Daniela Mercury and a social media influencer named Felipe Neto.
It also launched something called Lulaverso, a campaign website designed for young people, where users can join pro-Lula groups on major social media and share stickers and GIFs of the leftist icon dancing or wearing sunglasses.
- 'Long ways to go'-
The social media campaign "improved but still has a long ways to go," Workers Party president Gleisi Hoffmann told the news website G1 two weeks ago.
After Lula officially declared his candidacy this month, the party overhauled the campaign and named as its communications chiefs former lawmaker Rui Falcao and Edinho Silva, who was a government minister under president Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016).
"We are going to create a giant chain of activists and sympathizers and increase our communications means more and more so we can defeat Bolsonaro on every front," Falcao told AFP.
Lula's campaign is doing well in tradtional media outlets. But Bolsonaro's outreach from his ecosystem of pages and groups on digital platforms goes further because it targets everyday people rather than party members, said Pablo Ortellado, a professor of public policy and management at the University of São Paulo.
The Lula campaign's communication "is endogenous. It strengthen's people's conviction. But it does not manage to punch through the walls of its groups, which have a very defined ideology and political identity," Ortellado said.
- Avoid fake news -
Bolsonaro and Lula have very different ideas about freedom of expression.
Bolsonaro advocates easing rules governing social media platforms, several of which have erased some of his content on grounds that it spread fake news.
Lula backs regulating social media but has never really gone into detail on how he would do this. And his party works against generating or forwarding false news, via a campaign of "stickers" that warn against and label falsehoods from Bolsonaro supporters.
Brazilian electoral authorities have taken measures to prevent the campaign, which officially begins in August, from becoming another disinformation war, as happened in 2018, in particular on WhatsApp.
"We want to win the election with the truth," said Ze Augusto.
F.Schneider--AMWN