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How an extremist network articulated a hoax linking Brazil’s President Lula to child abuse on X

Illustration: How an extremist network articulated a hoax linking Brazil’s President Lula to child abuse on X
AI-generated illustration

Days before Brazil’s first-round general elections on October 4, 2026, a coordinated network of far-right users on X fabricated and spread a false claim linking President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to child sexual abuse. An analysis of nearly 1,900 posts by the fact-checking outlet Aos Fatos reconstructed how the operation unfolded over roughly 24 hours, beginning on the night of September 28.

How the hoax was built

The false narrative began with a deliberate misreading of remarks Lula made at a campaign event in the city of Belém, in Pará state. He had been encouraging men to undergo prostate cancer screenings, noting that women develop familiarity with medical examinations from a young age. Far-right accounts stripped those comments of their public health context and reframed them as an endorsement of child abuse.

Before that clip even circulated widely, a separate group of anonymous users had already begun manipulating Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot built into X, to produce sentences associating the president with child pornography. The chatbot flagged the outputs as wordplay without factual basis, but screenshots were shared regardless. Key steps in the campaign included:

  • Coordinated calls to download, repost and force specific videos to go viral
  • Organised efforts to push hashtags such as #LULAPEDOPHILE into trending topics
  • Proposals to recruit between ten and twenty influencers to amplify the content
  • Posts from prominent political figures, including Chamber of Deputies member Nikolas Ferreira, who shared the misleading clip hours after it began circulating

By mid-morning on September 29, several phrases tied to the campaign had reached the top of X’s trending topics list in Brazil. Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court subsequently ordered Ferreira to remove his post within 24 hours, ruling that he had attributed a meaning to Lula’s words that bore no relation to their original context.

The spread into conspiracy territory

Once the initial clip lost traction, accounts on X, Telegram and WhatsApp began weaving in unrelated episodes to suggest Lula belonged to a wider abuse network. These included references to documented but separately investigated cases of child sexual violence in the Marajó archipelago, unverified claims previously made by a former government minister about abuses in that region, and an email attributed to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein that mentioned a phone call with Lula — a claim denied by the Brazilian presidency and assessed by experts as incompatible with prison rules at the facility where Lula was held at the time.

The investigation by Aos Fatos, conducted as part of a collaborative electoral monitoring project, found that more than 40 percent of the posts examined contained outright accusations or active encouragement to spread the false claim, illustrating how quickly fabricated narratives can be industrialised on social media platforms in the lead-up to elections.

This article is adapted from “How an extremist network articulated a hoax linking Brazil’s President Lula to child abuse on X” published by Global Voices, licensed under CC BY 3.0. Changes were made. Read the original story at the link above.

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