Our approach to the 2022 elections in Brazil and partnership with AFP

The Brazilian presidential elections are happening, and Twitter is working to encourage safe and informed civic participation.

To do that, we’ve rolled out a series of products and initiatives designed to make credible information more accessible, provide real-time insights and context on important issues, highlight relevant conversations happening on Twitter, and more.

Here are some of the things we’ve done to promote healthy and informed Twitter conversations in Brazil.

Seeing what’s happening in the elections

Twitter has introduced a new “Eleições 2022” section in our Explore tab 🔎that’s regularly updated with the latest news and information related to the election. 

The tab is localized to include regional office races in 10 states across Brazil. For those who have Twitter notifications enabled, we send notices whenever an important moment or conversation around the election is taking place.

We’ve also made it easier to identify candidates running for President, Vice-President, Senator, and Governor by including easily visible labels on the profile page of each candidate’s Twitter account.

Focusing on civic integrity

Twitter created our Civic Integrity Policy to prevent our service from being used to interfere in elections or other civic acts. It’s an additional layer of protection whose purpose is to ensure that the public debate taking place on Twitter doesn’t harm people’s right or ability to vote. This extra policy is applied for a limited period of time before, during, and after an election — an interval determined by consulting with civic integrity experts.

With the Civic Integrity Policy in place in Brazil, Twitter will take measures in relation to content:

• Intended to intimidate people from participating in civic acts or to mislead them about how to take part in them
• That makes any false or misleading statements undermining public confidence in the election
• That intentionally indicates false or improper affiliation, own or of third parties, to candidates, parties and other institutions

Depending on the severity of the violation, corrective measures may include tagging or removing the Tweet or even suspending the account.

It’s important to note that this policy does not cover all types of political content. Its focus is on misleading information that may harm the progress, popular participation, and/or outcome of a democratic electoral process.

Keeping people informed

To help people find answers to their most common questions about the elections, we teamed up with Politize!, a civil society organization focused on political education. Anyone who sends a Direct Message (DM) to @Politize! will receive information that helps answer questions about the 2022 elections, politics in general, tips on how to spot fake news and have healthy conversations, and suggestions for reliable data sources.

We’ve also partnered with Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE) to create a series of search prompts that appear as the first result of Twitter searches related to the election, among other initiatives. These prompts direct people to the TSE’s official and reliable information on things like electronic voting machines, voter registration cards, and more.

Curating reliable content

We’re committed to expanding people’s access to reliable content related to the elections. That’s why we’re making “pre-bunk” Moments available — Tweets with credible information that are presented in Twitter’s Explore tab, Trends, and search area.

Pre-bunks bring factual context to the most common misleading claims related to elections thanks to our collaboration with trusted national and regional partners, allowing us to preemptively inform people of potential misinformation that may be circulating during the electoral period.

Twitter’s Curation team also provides “debunk” Moments to clarify, contrast, or contextualize misinformation narratives. Specific criteria are taken into account for both pre-bunks and debunks, including large volumes of conversations on a public health topic, electoral processes, or involving manipulated media.

Encouraging participation in the conversation

We know that the 2022 elections are important to Brazilians. The topic was Tweeted about more than 56 million times in the first eight months of 2022 alone. 

To help encourage people to engage in the conversation, Twitter has introduced a series of unique emojis around the elections in Brazil. These emojis appear whenever popular hashtags such as #Eleções2022, #VoteConsciente, and #ProjetoEleição are used.

We’ll be adding in additional hashtag-prompted emojis around specific events such as debates and on election day itself. 

Beyond the elections: Twitter’s partnership with AFP

Healthy conversations are informed by reliable information. 

That’s why Twitter has been partnering with AFP, a leading global news agency, to help elevate credible news and information in Portuguese. The collaboration started as a pilot in 2021 and has recently been renewed for a one-year term. It specifically focuses on Brazil, enabling our Curation Team to increase the speed and scale of our efforts to add context to the wide range of global topics and conversations happening on Twitter.

AFP has joined trusted news organizations Reuters and The Associated Press in working with Twitter to identify and elevate credible information. We then show this curated information to people in various locations throughout our service to give context to some of the most important and talked-about issues as they happen. These locations include:

• Trends
• The Explore tab
• Search
• Prompts
• Tweet labels

Learn more 

For more on what we’re doing to encourage civic participation in Brazil, check out our Portuguese-language articles here and here.