Governmental Communication in Brazil: Dilemmas for the Present and the Future - 9/9/22

Liziane Soares Guazina

The digital communicative environment in Brazil has been marked by toxic disputes over visibility. Misinformation, hate speech, distrust in institutions, and attacks on political opponents are strategic resources for positioning the images of public figures.

In this context, the challenges of governmental communication in the country are increasing. Historically, governmental communication has been understood by Brazilian scholars and communication professionals as a fundamental element of informing the public in the context of building a democratic society. 

In other words, governmental communication practices rely on the notion that the communication by the government and State bodies must be guided by principles that consider the public interest as a priority. This type of communication, carried out by government institutions, and leaders, presupposes a democratic regime in order to be effective, with the commitment to work for its maintenance and improvement.

The main governmental communication objective must be to strengthen democratic life by complying with the principles of public communication: expanding access to information, encouraging participation, guaranteeing the transparency of the State, promoting rights, listening to citizens, and even fighting disinformation. 

These principles are especially relevant when talking about campaigns and information produced on official websites, platforms, and apps. The Brazilian State has a strong digital presence and practically all legislative, executive, and judiciary bodies at the federal level have institutional pages. In addition, according to a survey by the Internet Steering Committee in Brazil in 2021, 99% of federal agencies and 92% of state agencies had profiles on social networks. In addition, 49% of federal agencies and 46% of state agencies maintain profiles on apps such as WhatsApp or Telegram.

This digital presence, however, contains ambiguities. Not only government agencies maintain profiles, but also government agents distribute information publicly on private platforms. During the Covid-19 pandemic, authorities published disinformation and disclosed decisions based on flagrant misinformation. The results of the Report on Disinformation, Social Media and Covid-19 in Brazil show how the authorities played a key role in legitimizing disinformation during the pandemic. According to the Report (p. 24), when disinformation comes from authorities, that content tends to spread faster in social media and reach more people than that published by ordinary people or automated accounts.

Such content, the Report shows, was shared in private profiles of government authorities on Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, and Instagram. It was guided by public policies of the Ministry of Health, as in the case of encouraging the use of the ineffective hydro chloroquine to combat Covid-19.

In addition to institutional profiles, those pages produced by the government agents usually constitute the very “face” of the government, as these sites issue information on a daily basis. The dissemination of content organized according to a framework of ideologically radicalized and personalist perceptions violates the principles of public communication that is committed to institutional impersonality.

The dissemination of this content has the clear objective of stimulating the politicization of any public theme for the purpose of mobilizing followers, using appeals to emotion and intensifying the conflict between us and them. The set of personalist and negationist strategies reflects a process of the privatization of the dissemination of public information and the emptying of the institutional character of governmental communication. This jeopardizes trust in institutions and their commitment to the public interest.

Even with the strict rules defined by the electoral legislation in 2022, which include the suspension of content that can be characterized as institutional advertising or that favor specific candidates, government information continues to include false and personal content disseminated by senior government agents, such as attacks against the electoral system and the electronic ballot box.

Civil society must mobilize to ensure a healthy political environment during and after the election period. The political groups that make use of these resources have gained centrality in the public debate. Even if they are defeated at the polls, they will remain present in the political dispute with a powerful arsenal of communication channels and digital mobilization strategies.

More than ever, there must be a renewed commitment to the public nature of government communication, which requires immediate actions to rebuild trust in the information produced and disseminated by all levels of the Brazilian State.

Liziane Soares Guazina is Visiting Scholar at the University of Turim, Italy, professor on the Graduate Program in Communication at the University of Brasília, and Research Fellow at the 21st Century Populism Observatory. She holds a doctorate in Communication from the University of Brasília.