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The prevalence and spread of online misinformation during the 2020 US presidential election served to perpetuate a false belief in widespread election fraud. Though much research has focused on how social media platforms connected people to election-related rumors and conspiracy theories, less is known about the search engine pathways that linked users to news content with the potential to undermine trust in elections. In this paper, we present novel data related to the content of political headlines during the 2020 US election period. We scraped over 800,000 headlines from Google's search engine results pages (SERP) in response to 20 election-related keywords—10 general (e.g., "Ballots") and 10 conspiratorial (e.g., "Voter fraud")—when searched from 20 cities across 16 states. We present results from qualitative coding of 5,600 headlines focused on the prevalence of delegitimizing information. Our results reveal that videos (as compared to stories, search results, and advertisements) are the most problematic in terms of exposing users to delegitimizing headlines. We also illustrate how headline content varies when searching from a swing state, adopting a conspiratorial search keyword, or reading from media domains with higher political bias. We conclude with policy recommendations on data transparency that allow researchers to continue to monitor search engines during elections.
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“Our Brazil Has Become a Mess”: Nostalgic Narratives of Disorder and Disinterest as a “Once-Rising Poor” Family from Recife, Brazil, Anticipates the 2018 Elections: Our Brazil has Become a Mess
This article presents an ethnographic account of an extended family from the north- eastern city of Recife, Brazil, during the months prior to the 2018 elections in which hard-right politician, Jair Bolsonaro, was elected to Brazil’s presidency. The family ex- emplifies the sector contentiously referred to as the “new middle class”—the estimated thirty-five million people who rose above the poverty line during fourteen years of rule by the left-leaning Workers’ Party, but whose prospects have since become precarious. Drawing from extended ethnographic fieldwork, I present a series of ethnographic moments, each illustrating how informal conversations about the coming elections both reflected and affected family dynamics. Emerging within these moments are narratives of moral disintegration, apparent nostalgia for Brazil’s 1964–85 military dictatorship, lost masculinities, menacing sexualities, and the regeneration of political “zombies.” I advance a series of theoretical claims about dimensions of the political affinities of Brazil’s “previously poor” that merit deeper ethnographic investigation.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1534655
- PAR ID:
- 10125857
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
- Volume:
- 24
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1935-4932
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12443
