With the 2022 election only weeks away, YouTube, owned by US tech giant Google, has been found to be favouring pro-Bolsonaro videos in its recommendations to users in a damning new study. The videos include conspiracy theories and attacks on the electoral process.

Folha de São Paulo reports that the YouTube algorithm has found to be giving prominence to videos in favor of President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) in its recommendations. The findings were published by NetLab, a special unit at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).

According to opinion polls, Bolsonaro is on course to lose the coming election, after a catastrophic first term, and the far-right president and his military dominated government has attempted to cast doubt on the electoral process itself, as a means to remain in power. The UFRG study finds he is being aided in this by YouTube, owned by US tech giant Google.

It is not the first time the company has faced criticism for apparent political interference in Brazil. In recent years it was discovered that Google/YouTube had been coaching social media influencers on how to monetise right-wing content on the platform, and 12 extreme-right channels publishing anti-democratic content were found to have received R$5.6 million reais over 2 years.

YouTube had earlier been central to the propaganda campaign underpinning the 2016 removal of Dilma Rousseff, and the US-orchestrated anti-corruption operation Lava Jato which underpinned it, which then jailed frontrunner Lula, handing the 2018 election to Bolsonaro.

Given Google’s position as a tool of US foreign policy, the latest revelations are all the more disturbing. Although the Biden administration has sought to distance itself publicly from the far-right Trump ally’s anti-democratic discourse, it has sent multiple delegations to liase with the Bolsonaro government in recent months.

Bolsonarista Propaganda

The objective of NetLab’s survey was to identify which channels and news content was being given high visibility by the YouTube recommendation algorithm during the period from August 23 to 30.

For the experiment, NetLab created 18 new profiles, which accessed the platform on different dates and times using an incognito browser tab and VPN, a tool that hid the user’s true IP address and simulated a random geographic location within Brazil for each test. .

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