Nauzila Campos – from Cenarium Magazine
MANAUS – Imagine a clandestine factory of toxic products with such a great damaging power, but so great, that it is able to change people’s mentality and opinion about real, concrete, even scientifically proven facts – all this without them even noticing. Appalling, isn’t it? But even worse is to report that such an industry already exists.
The production of fake news has been in full swing for the past decade, and it does not stop for a moment. It has become significantly profitable to mobilize crowds toward non-existent or at least distorted beliefs. Electionist, defamatory strategies, and even strategies against great Amazon symbols – such as the environment and traditional peoples – are part of the dissemination of fake news. Thinking about the protection of the Amazon not only in relation to the forest, but also to what people think about it, the project ‘Amazonas – Lies have a price’ puts into action measures to combat fake news in the state. The main weapon is the truth.
With the use of investigative journalism and support from the wisdom of traditional communities, the project, an initiative of InfoAmazonia, discovered and disclosed, for example, that manipulation in WhatsApp groups is a strategy to weaken the indigenous struggle. It is through these reports that the members of the project clarify the Amazon reality from within the North to the rest of Brazil. In the situation mentioned above, when thousands of indigenous people camped in front of the Supreme Federal Court, in Brasilia – September 2021, to protest against the ‘temporal milestone’, the 52-year-old cacique Agnelo Xavante, from the Etewawe Indigenous Land, located in the state of Mato Grosso, stopped the whole movement after receiving a fake video on his cell phone.
“The video arrived in many WhatsApp groups. It hurt us. Do you know what 320 angry Xavante villages are? This had never happened before. I, a warrior of the Xavante people, could not listen and remain silent”, shouted the cacique, with a microphone in hand, speaking with almost 6 thousand indigenous people.
Not by chance, the content of the video is not made available in the project’s report. The idea is to prevent the spreading of lies and to disseminate only solid facts. But the video, which circulated on social networks during September last year, directly affected the integrity of the indigenous organizations that were representing ethnic groups from all over Brazil. The profitable interest of this fake news was clear: with the continuation of the temporal landmark in the STF, dozens of indigenous lands would have the seal of justice for invasion.
Bruno Tadeu, a journalist working in the Amazon and born in Pará, is part of the project as press officer and disseminator of the reports. He explains in more detail what the site, right on the home page, sums up: ‘It seems true, but it’s not. There are people who make money by lying.
“The flagship of the project is investigative journalistic productions. To talk about the use of funding from both news portals and social network sites for content that is either negative about the Amazon, the environment, deforestation… Or it is used in a way that attenuates the issue, the reality. There it also enters a merit of the environmental commitment of our institutions and politicians, with matters questioning the actions of parliamentarians both at the state and federal levels”.
Plural services for the Amazon
Bruno already anticipates a little of what is already being investigated and will soon be published. And the project will not spare whoever is responsible for the omissions in the care for the Amazon. “There will be material criticizing the actions of some news portals in relation to environmental agendas, in which there is a great omission in relation to this subject from the local point of view. One of the materials that is still to come out has a whole reflection around this. Our institutions and political groups, do they act to minimize the destruction of our biome?
The ‘Lies have a price’ project is not limited to reporting. Dissemination of knowledge, such as fact-finding workshops and materials aimed at young people (encouraging them to vote, for example) are also part of the initiative. And the intention is not only to criticize and point out omissions in news portals, but to promote reflections and disseminate good examples of vehicles that act committed to the Amazon.
Fake news kill
Reports from the Indigenous Missionary Council (Cimi) and the Articulation of the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (Apib) have already shown that 2020 will be the year marked by a high number of indigenous deaths as a consequence of the precarious confrontation with the pandemic in Brazil. As disinformation through false news has been the hallmark of the presidential administration, the document from Apib goes so far as to state that “The Federal Government is the main agent transmitting the virus among indigenous peoples”.
Indigenous representatives told the project how the dissemination of fake news influences even the most traditional peoples.
“The fake news said that the vaccine was from the devil, that it comes with an implanted chip, everything that was for people not to take it. And we had resistance within the territory: in a channel [area in the river] where there are more than a thousand people only 160 wanted to take the vaccine at that moment”, said the president of the Federation of Indigenous Organizations of Rio Negro (FOIRN), in the Amazon, Marivaldo Baré, to ‘Priceless Lies’.
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