Recruit three friends, share a video: the missions that fought Brazil’s election on WhatsApp

How Brazil’s candidates turned WhatsApp into their main campaign platform

WhatsApp has been part of Brazil’s election fights for years: in 2018, the company admitted that its app had been used to send political messages in bulk. This year, after Lula finished behind Flávio Bolsonaro in the first round on October 4, both campaigns made it their main organising tool.

The largest channel, Exército do Lula (Lula’s Army), was run by congressman André Janones and grew from about 60,000 followers to almost 11 million in three weeks. Followers could not reply. They received “missions” – share this video, recruit three friends, push this hashtag – and carried them out on Instagram and X. Bolsonaro’s supporters ran a rival channel, Tropa do Flávio.

Both sides took their complaints to the electoral court. Bolsonaro’s campaign said Lula’s Army spread false claims; the court briefly suspended the channel, found none of the flagged messages and let it return under monitoring. Lula’s campaign said Meta, which owns WhatsApp and Instagram, limited its reach and recommended the rival channel to people searching for Lula’s; the court ordered Meta to treat both candidates equally. Meta denies favouring either side.

Lula won the runoff on October 25 with 51.8% of valid votes. Two days later, Supreme Court justice Flávio Dino ordered the Federal Police to look for foreign interference in the campaign: whether Bolsonaro’s campaign received money from abroad, including through contacts with a US-based group called Rockbridge Network, whether accounts outside Brazil paid for posts, and whether Meta’s problems were technical or deliberate.

A fake ‘former student’ accused a Texas Senate candidate of assault, and researchers trace the video to Russia

James Talarico taught language arts at a San Antonio middle school before entering Texas politics; he is now the Democratic candidate for US Senate there, hoping to win a traditionally Republican state in the November 3 midterms. On October 20, an X account using the name of one of his former students posted two videos in which a man, speaking to camera, says Talarico sexually assaulted him in 2012. The account had been created in September, and its profile photo and old posts were copied from the real former student’s Facebook page. The real man told fact-checkers that the person in the videos is not him and called the clips “very bad AI”. San Antonio police have no record of any such report.

Researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and Clemson University attribute the videos to Storm-1516, a Russian operation that stages fake accusation videos and pushes them through influencer accounts; in 2024 it ran a nearly identical claim against Tim Walz, then the Democratic vice-presidential nominee. NPR traced the path of the Talarico post: 15 bot-like accounts shared it immediately, and about twelve hours later it was picked up by three accounts with large followings, one of which has advertised paid partnerships on X.

AP has since found a second target: a fabricated TV news report about Sherrod Brown, the Democratic Senate candidate in Ohio, that uses photos of Haya Akbik, a former intern in his office, who says the claims attributed to her are “completely made up”. X suspended the accounts that first posted both videos, though copies remained online on Tuesday. The Russian embassy did not respond to AP and has denied election interference in the past. After the House intelligence committee’s fifth classified briefing on October 27, its senior Democrat Jim Himes said nothing suggests an attempt to tamper with voting itself, and that the threat is disinformation aimed at voters.

Hacked files name the Kremlin officials who run Russia’s fake news sites

Since 2022, an operation known as Doppelgänger has been cloning the websites of Bild, The Guardian and other Western outlets and filling the copies with fabricated stories meant to undermine support for Ukraine. Researchers have long attributed it to the Kremlin. The Insider, a Russian investigative outlet, has now obtained hacked correspondence between Russia’s Presidential Administration and the Agency for Social Design, the contractor that does the work.

The files show the project was set up under Sergey Kiriyenko, Putin’s first deputy chief of staff, and is run day to day by Ilya Gambashidze, whose agency reports its results to named Kremlin aides. One manager saved the prompts used to mass-produce comments with AI: a 450-character complaint about Olympic spending written as “a 38-year-old Frenchman”, a 400-character one about food prices as “a 38-year-old Polish woman”. By The Insider’s count the team failed more often than it succeeded, but its ads ran on Meta platforms and one of its Telegram channels reached 70,000 subscribers. In October 2024, Putin gave Gambashidze a state medal.

A study published by Sweden’s Psychological Defence Agency on October 15 maps the wider system around Kiriyenko. Its authors count at least 50 state-affiliated organisations and 20 long-term programmes under his direct or indirect control, with a combined budget of €1.3–1.7 billion a year – roughly what Russia spends on all of its state media, RT included. They conclude that Kiriyenko likely oversees all Russian information influence campaigns, and name Moldova, Hungary and Armenia as recent targets.