In October 2024, 5,568 Brazilian municipalities will go to the polls to elect municipal councilors and mayors, but the election campaigns will begin much earlier. In the 2018 and 2020 elections, digital campaigns played a key role in political campaigns as a whole, and this year we expect to see even greater use of these new technologies.

Hate speech, disinformation and political ads are some of the main concerns for the online election campaign process and they are risks mapped in “Electoral Integrity in the Digital Environment: Risks and Recommendations for Brazilian Municipal Elections,” a study carried out by Germany’s Democracy Reporting International (DRI) in partnership with the FGV School of Communication, Media and Information, the FGV Rio de Janeiro Law School and fact-checking organization Lupa.

The use of advanced artificial intelligence tools, together with human moderation, to effectively identify and mitigate hate speech, disinformation and polarizing content and to adjust algorithms to reduce the visibility of misleading or harmful content were some of the main recommendations presented in the report. The categories of State, Politics, Media and Society were explored in order to map risks and recommendations for the electoral authorities, digital platforms, civil society organizations and other political actors.

The risks mapped by the study are divided into three broad areas: hate speech, disinformation and political ads. Based on these risks in online debate during the elections, the study drew up recommendations aimed at strengthening democracy in the digital environment and anticipating regulatory and communication challenges in online campaigns in 2024.