The Electoral Observation Mission of the Organization of American States (OAS), which, in 2018, accompanied for the first time a Brazilian election, highlighted the Digital Democracy Room #observa2018 of FGV’s Department of Public Policy Analysis (DAPP) as one of the innovations to be observed in its final report (English version) on the elections. The document states that the phenomenon of fake news, already witnessed in electoral processes around the world, presented new challenges, such as the use of private messaging systems to disseminate mass disinformation. The Democracy Room monitored for 100 days the impact of social networks on the Brazilian elections.

The report states that “the Mission highlights preventive campaigns and studies on the use of social networks in electoral processes by other stakeholders in civil society, such as those carried out by Digital Democracy Room of Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV).”

The Mission, which visited the unit’s headquarters during the project’s operation, mentioned FGV DAPP’s report that the final stage of the first round generated a debate on social networks, which produced 14.3 million tweets and 16 million interactions on the Facebook pages of the 13 presidential candidates. Over 100 days, the Digital Democracy Room analyzed over 130 million tweets and 163 million interactions on Facebook, as well as public data from Instagram and YouTube.

The OAS counted on 83 specialists and observers in its two allocations for the first and second round of the elections. During the period, it held meetings with electoral and government officials, political parties and candidates, representatives of civil society, academics, and the diplomatic community.