Brazil

The ascent of leaders who favor free trade opens space for real integration.

Test your knowledge of deforestation, from its role in climate change to efforts to combat it.

Valentin Weber is a DPhil candidate in cybersecurity and a research affiliate with the Centre for Technology and Global Affairs at the University of Oxford. He is also an Open Technology Fund (OTF) Senior Fellow in Information Controls at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University. You can follow him @weberv_ Censorship in China is often described as a cat and mouse game. As soon as netizens come up with a term to express their frustrations or call for collective action the term will be censored. So was the letter n, which netizens used to refer to Xi Jinping being in office the n-th amount of time, or qiou, a neologism which means dirt-poor and ugly, and refers to being an underdog in a society that praises consumerism and status symbols. The censorship game has been going back and forth for years and the government seems to have retained the upper hand in it. In an influential report dubbed Collateral Freedom, the Open Internet Tools Project found that Chinese censors are most aggressive when censorship incurs low economic damage and less willing to act when the perceived economic damage is greater. This principle was exploited by the censorship-circumvention technique of domain fronting, in which a technical quirk of websites hosted on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform (and similar services by Google) was used to trick the censorship infrastructure into allowing blocked traffic. These circumvention-enabling sites were resistant to blocking, as banning one AWS-hosted webpage would result in other websites hosted on the Amazon cloud being similarly blocked. Recently, citing a variety of cybersecurity and legal hazards created by domain fronting, both Amazon and Google disabled domain fronting, removing a widely-used approach for users to bypass censorship. However, despite the recent setback in domain fronting, what if there were other ways of ensuring high levels of collateral damage when blocking services? What if there were terms that are incredibly hard to censor, because the potential economic damage would be too great? The concept is the following: take an economically important term, such as Mate 20X, ZTE or even Lenovo’s advertising slogan Let the World Connect (让世界一起联想). Lenovo – Let the World Connect may indicate that the company connects the world, but it may also be a call for collective action. Tencent’s slogan Connecting People for a Greater Future (连接你我共生未来) may just as well indicate that people ought to go out and organize themselves in order to create a greater future. A similar technique was adopted in Brazil’s 2013 protests, where protesters took Johnnie Walker’s slogan The giant has awoken to the streets. Those words build on national pride and are inherently emotional, since advertising builds on emotions to increase customer consumption. A powerful advertising slogan that induces people to buy products, can just as well be used to organize collective action and bring people to the streets. While major companies do the branding and distribution of the slogans, citizens can engage in a subvertising effort (a combination of subversion and advertising used by the AdBusters organization, for instance). Luckily all slogans will already be not only present in online fora, but also in the streets through the sheer presence of company advertising posters and material. While a company can just come up with another advertising slogan, in case it is appropriated by protesters, it is harder to change a company’s name that can be rebranded to serve calls for collective action. Lenovo (联想) means to associate, or connect cognitively in Chinese. Similarly, Huawei’s first character (华) refers to China or Chinese and the second character (为) to action or achievement. There are some limitations to this proposition. Firstly, this is not a censorship circumvention approach – it will not provide citizens with access to foreign websites that are shielded by the Great Firewall. Websites will still be inaccessible. Secondly, citizens who intend to rebrand words or slogans will have to sway public perception that Connecting People for a Greater Future applies to social movements and not only to the technological possibilities of a phone. Given that the letter n was rebranded successfully from a simple letter into a one with a politically charged connotation, however, then Tencent slogans can gain a new meaning as well. The crucial difference being that censoring the letter n (in isolation) was acceptable to censors, censoring Connecting People for a Greater Future will be costlier. Even if individual slogans are banned at some point, it will have caused some economic costs associated with the blocking, as well as advanced dissemination of calls for collective action. Thirdly, taking brands or advertising slogans as vehicles for political movement may encounter another challenge. It may drown in an overflow of similar information. What happens when you google Google? Nothing exciting. It is hard to find any targeted information on the company. It must be just as difficult to find anything political on Connecting People for a Greater Future when one searches it on Baidu. Therefore, the proliferation of these meanings will have to rely on people communicating with each other on RenRen or Weibo. In this way, the slogans and words will be shared just as the letter n or qiou were on a person to person basis. Thereby collective-action-information can flow, regardless of the vast amounts of similar information online. This approach can reintroduce the collateral effects of censorship as applied to social messaging, which has already proven to be effective in reducing censorship. By deliberately designing communication strategies to exploit collateral effects, the cat is unable to distinguish between the mouse and its own tail, and will choose not to bite either. 

Online misinformation is a problem for democracies worldwide, but we should worry about how misinformation will change democracies in the developing world.

A comparison of two Amazons, one corporate and one natural, underscores the vast discrepancy between the health of the economy and the vitality of the environment. 

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, covering January 5 to January 11, was compiled with support from Rebecca Turkington and Rebecca Hughes.

Investing more in human capital is the region’s best hope to escape the middle-income trap.

Injustice, not economic class, is what’s turning voters against the political establishment. 

Brazil’s digital environment is a fertile ground for innovative strategies to spread polarizing content with the intent of manipulating public debate.

Jair Bolsonaro has vowed to overhaul Brazil’s economy and align the country more closely with the United States, with uncertain implications for its relations with China.

Federal investigators in Brazil have uncovered corruption at the highest levels of the government and in the country’s largest corporations.

Fiery new populist presidents in Brazil and Mexico could turn an old rivalry toxic.

Last week, following Jair Bolsonaro’s performance in the first round of Brazil’s presidential elections, when bolson exceeded predictions and won 46 percent of the first round vote, this column examined how Bolsonaro actually had more in common with Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte than with many other populists who have run for office in Europe and North America in recent years. Bolsonaro now appears likely to win the presidency in the second round of the election; polls have him leading the other final round candidate, Fernando Haddad, by sixteen points. It seems almost impossible that Haddad would win, given that the second round is in less than two weeks, and Haddad trails by such a wide margin. Bolsonaro and Duterte come from different ideological backgrounds. Bolsonaro, a former army captain, has been on the far right for decades. The Philippine president has in the past called himself a socialist, and has in office promoted some left-leaning programs on issues like family planning. But both have an authoritarian populist style that promises tough action, simple solutions to problems, and a strongman who will fight crime and right the economy, ignoring democratic norms if needed. Both Duterte and Bolsonaro, like many autocratic-leaning populists who have gained power in the past decade, have emerged in relatively abnormal circumstances in their countries’ modern histories. (To be sure, when looked at over centuries, authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian rule is not an abnormal occurrence in either Brazil or the Philippines; the two states were autocracies in the mid-1980s.) In Brazil, a massive spike in violent crime and an economic downturn led to a curdling of popular support for mainstream parties and candidates, for instance, and paved the way for Bolsonaro’s breakthrough. And, like in many other instances of populists’ triumphs, Duterte built on his election and quickly gained enormous power over state institutions, even though he won the presidency with less than 50 percent of the total popular vote. Duterte has nonetheless gained dominant control over the lower house of parliament, and wields massive influence over the Supreme Court and Senate as well. He also has proven mostly invulnerable to public outrage over his abuses of norms and abusive language, policy missteps like his administration’s lack of preparation for the conflict in the Philippine south in 2017, questions over Duterte’s health, or other issues that might have been politically fatal scandals for other politicians. With Duterte’s reputation as a wild strongman baked into his political persona, scandal leaves little mark on him—just as scandal did not significantly harm the political fortunes of other autocratic-leaning populists like Italy’s former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi or former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. So, like Duterte, Bolsonaro probably will be able to command vast power from day one, and expand his power base quickly—and his opponents will have more trouble combating him than they would another politician. Scandal, insulting public remarks—for which Bolsonaro is already known—these are unlikely to dent the public image of an autocratic-leaning populist. Indeed, as several authors have noted, autocratic-leaning populists often prove so politically enduring that they can make multiple comebacks from seeming political death. Autocratic populists become vulnerable only after years of public fatigue with their antics and endless crises, and/or when “normal” and major political challenges emerge, and their opponents can fight them on core issues, as Matthew Yglesias has noted, rather than battling about scandals. For Duterte, that could be the increasingly high price of rice, as well as rising inflation, although Duterte has amassed so much support in the legislature, and among the public, that he still looks likely to come out of the midterm elections next year relatively unscathed. For Berlusconi, the 2011 euro crisis was a leading factor that led to his ouster. But before normal politics could bring down an autocratic-leaning populist, they can rule for a very long time.