Three days after the first round of voting in Brazil’s election on October 1, David Nemer, assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, noted that “Twitter is not Brazil. Brazil is not on Twitter.”

He was echoing the views of many experts who have cautioned that many on both the left and the right had been predicting the outcome of the vote based too much on Twitter trends and hashtags.

As it turned out, incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro proved pollsters wrong. While he did come second behind former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party as expected, the five-percentage point gap between them was much smaller than the double-digit gulf that had been predicted. Bolsonaro managed to force an October 30 runoff that would not have been necessary if Lula had secured more than half of the vote.

Full article at Al Jazeera’s website. Date of publication: 17/10/2022.