Date:
For a recording of this event, click here.
Speakers: Claire Wardle, Co-founder and US Director, First Draft; David Nemer, Faculty Associate, Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center; Pablo Ortellado, Professor of Public Policy, Universidade de São Paulo (USP)
Moderated by: Sidney Chalhoub, Professor of History and African and African-American Studies, Harvard University; Natalia Viana, Nieman Fellow, Harvard University; Co-founder and Co-director, Agência Pública
As Brazilian presidential elections approach, researchers are unanimous to point out that fake news and misinformation campaigns will be core threats to a transparent and fair process. The Electoral Court has taken a series of actions including education campaigns and a partnership with Whatsapp to allow users to denounce bulk messages from candidates. On top of that, President Jair Bolsonaro has already started questioning the legitimacy of the Brazilian electoral system and calling previous elections “rigged” – much like Donald Trump did in 2016 and 2020. Even though media platforms such as Youtube, Facebook and Twitter have acted to suspend false information produced by politicians in the past, observers claim very little was done ever since and the integrity of the elections are at stake. But what are the real risks? What needs to be done so that we don’t see a repetition of the “Big Lie” of US elections play out in Brazil? In this panel, Claire Wardle, one of the leaders of the collaborative fact-checking project Comprova, Pablo Ortellado, Coordinator of the the Research Group on Public Policies for Access to Information (GPoPAI) at the University of Sao Paulo, and David Nemer, Faculty Associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center, will discuss what needs to be done to ensure free and fair elections in Brazil.
Dr. Claire Wardle is a leading expert on user generated content, verification and misinformation. She is co-founder and director of First Draft, the world’s foremost nonprofit focused on research and practice to address mis- and disinformation. In 2017 she co-authored a report for the Council of Europe entitled, Information Disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policymaking. Dr. Wardle is a co-founder and Executive Chair of First Draft, the world’s foremost nonprofit focused on research and practice to address mis- and disinformation. Previously, Dr. Wardle was a Research Fellow at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, and also the Research Director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. She has worked with newsrooms and humanitarian organizations around the world, providing training and consultancy on digital transformation. Dr. Wardle earned a PhD in communications and an MA in political science from the University of Pennsylvania. She is based in New York City.
David Nemer is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Affiliated Faculty in Latin American Studies at the University of Virginia. He is also a Faculty Associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center and an Affiliated Scholar at Princeton University’s Brazil Lab. Nemer is the author of Technology of the Oppressed: Inequity and the Digital Mundane in Favelas of Brazil (Forthcoming in 2022, MIT Press) and Favela Digital: The Other Side of Technology (2013, GSA). He has written for The Guardian, El País, The Huffington Post (HuffPost), Salon, The Intercept_, UOL, and Carta Capital.
Pablo Ortellado holds a degree in Philosophy from the University of São Paulo (1998) and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of São Paulo (2003). He is a professor of the Public Policy and advisor in the postgraduate program in Cultural Studies at the University of São Paulo. He is also the coordinator of the Research Group on Public Policies for Access to Information (Gpopai).
Sidney Chalhoub is Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. He taught at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil, for thirty years before coming to Harvard in the fall of 2015. His research and writing focus mainly on the social history of Brazil in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with emphasis on the history of slavery, race, public health, and the literature of Machado de Assis, a writer of African descent widely regarded as the most important Brazilian novelist of all times. He published five individual books, three of them on the social history of Rio de Janeiro: Trabalho, lar e botequim (1986), on working-class culture in the early twentieth century; Visões da liberdade (1990), on the last decades of slavery in the city; and Cidade febril (1996), on tenements and epidemics in the second half of the nineteenth century. He also published Machado de Assis, historiador (2003), about the literature and political ideas of Machado de Assis. His most recent book is A força da escravidão: ilegalidade e costume no Brasil oitocentista (2012), on illegal enslavement and the precariousness of freedom in nineteenth-century Brazil. Chalhoub has also co-edited five other volumes on the social history of Brazil. At Harvard, he teaches courses on slavery, race, literature, and theories and methodologies of history, besides a lecture course on the History of Brazil, from Independence (1822) to the Present.
Natalia Viana is a co-founder and co-director of Brazilian investigative journalism Agência Pública, founded in 2011 by women reporters. She is the author or co-author of four books about human rights violations and has won several journalism awards, including the Gabriel García Márquez award in 2016.
Presented in collaboration with Agência Pública and Pacto pela Democracia