Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Arrested U.S. soldier was in Russia to pursue girlfriend

Middle East conflict live updates: WHO says health services in south Gaza will run out of fuel in three days

U.S. signals optimism for Gaza cease-fire as Israel moves into Rafah 

How Trump’s allies amplify his Truth Social messages to the wider world

In Arizona, election workers trained with deepfakes to prepare for 2024

Biden back in the battleground state of Wisconsin

Nats go over .500 the hard way by beating the O’s and Corbin Burnes

These Nationals are pretty fun. They’d be more fun with James Wood.

Baseball can crush rookies. Why hasn’t it crushed Trey Lipscomb?

Serve seared scallops on a creamy herb sauce for a quick, elegant meal

Seared Scallops With Creamy Herb Sauce

From a forgotten Indian cookbook, a deeply flavored chickpea curry

Dog hit by car loses leg, is adopted by firefighter who helped her

Postal worker finds WWII-era letters, drives 5 hours to deliver them

Strangers help Sesame Street puppeteer after heirloom necklace was stolen

Cruise worker charged with stabbing 3 with scissors on ship off Canada

France tries to shed its rude reputation ahead of the Olympics

Don’t be a jerk at the airport: A guide for headphones

RFK Jr’s ‘history lesson’ on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine flunks the fact test

In court, Stormy Daniels pulled a Trump on Trump 

Social Security has to be fixed. But you still need your own savings.

An I bond is now at 4.28 percent. Are they still a good deal?

Use these 6 points to say no to a college you and your kid can’t afford

The Trump-Biden battle over the 2017 tax cut

That time football legend, rig-driving eligible bachelor Biden was arrested

‘Look at the U.S.A.’: A photographer’s reflection on post-9/11 conflict

In photos: The scene after tornadoes struck Michigan and Oklahoma 

A college professor wants to use Section 230 against Big Tech

Commerce Department revokes more export licenses to China’s Huawei

Defense think tank MITRE to build AI supercomputer with Nvidia 

The next global crisis could come from the sun. We should prepare now.

The FTC’s noncompete clause rule goes too far

The crisis Biden and Trump don’t want to deal with

Carolyn Hax: Family pushes siblings to ‘make amends’ after their mother’s death

Miss Manners: I’m offended by a golfer’s skirt choice

Ask Amy: I want to be closer with my brother. He never reaches out to me.

Trump hush money trial live updates: Stormy Daniels testifies

Former U.S. President Donald Trump appears at court in New York

Adriano Machado

RIO DE JANEIRO — The call went out across Telegram late last month. Brazil’s far right, which has in recent months migrated to the messaging app by the millions, had a new goal: Help President Jair Bolsonaro win the reader’s poll for<b> </b>Time magazine’s 2021 Person of the Year.

“INVITE PEOPLE TO CLICK ON THE LINK AND VOTE,” one user urged the 47,000 followers of the ultraconservative Telegram group Right Channel.

In the end, Time named billionaire entrepreneur <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/12/13/time-magazine-elon-musk/" target=_blank>Elon Musk</a> its Person of the Year this past week. But the Tesla and SpaceX executive didn’t get the most reader votes — not by a long shot. That honor belonged to Bolsonaro, who won in a landslide, garnering one-fourth of the 9 million votes — twice as many as his closest competitor, friend Donald Trump.

The outcome serves as an urgent reminder of the political resilience of Bolsonaro, whose base has stuck by him amid flagging approval ratings, and an introduction to the growing power of Telegram, which analysts say played a crucial role in propelling Bolsonaro to victory — and could prove a disruptive factor in next year’s presidential elections.

Bolsonaro once said he’d stage a military takeover. Now Brazilians fear he could be laying the foundation for one.

In the past several years, as Bolsonaro has repeatedly encouraged people to join him on the app, it has been downloaded to more than half of the phones in Brazil. Officials and researchers here now fear its unique combination of features — lax content moderation, encrypted messaging services, default anonymity — could be exploited by political opportunists to spread misinformation, undermine confidence in public institutions and deepen the country’s divisions.

“Telegram isn’t that concerned about monitoring its content like Facebook or Twitter,” said Sérgio Spagnuolo, founder of Núcleo Jornalismo, which analyzes the impact of social media on daily life. “So let’s say Politician X wants to say the election results were fraudulent, they aren’t going to do it on Twitter, where it will be taken down. They will do it on Telegram.”

The fear is particularly relevant in Brazil, where Bolsonaro has spent much of the last year working to undermine confidence in the integrity of the country’s voting system and warning that next year’s vote will be rigged.

EVARISTO SA

Founded in 2013 by Pavel Durov, a Russian billionaire in self-exile, Telegram looks and functions like a supercharged WhatsApp. Groups can swell to 200,000 users, rather than just 256. There are no limits on how many times a message can be forwarded. People aren’t forced to divulge their phone numbers. Politicians and celebrities can use a one-way channel feature as a megaphone.

But perhaps what most distinguishes it most from other leading social media platforms is its permissive content moderation. As other social media platforms have cracked down on misinformation or conspiracy theories, Telegram has been seen as a safe harbor. When Twitter and Facebook removed Trump from their sites after his followers stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, the site was swarmed by tens of millions of users. The digital migration then spread to Brazil, another large, messy democracy struggling with misinformation and a politicized media landscape.

Calls to impeach Bolsonaro are rising, but his grip on Brazil remains strong

The source of much of the country’s polarization has been Bolsonaro himself, a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">coronavirus</a> and vaccine skeptic who has sought to erode trust in the country’s institutions and coronavirus protective measures. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have responded by removing several of Bolsonaro’s videos and statements. The country’s supreme court has led a probe into misinformation, which has led to the arrest of several high-profile Bolsonaro supporters and their removal from social media sites.

In response, Bolsonaro and his followers have pushed a change to Telegram.

“Of course we’re growing our network on Telegram,” Bolsonaro <a href="https://pleno.news/brasil/politica-nacional/logico-que-ampliamos-nossa-rede-com-o-telegram-nao-tem-censura.html" target=_blank>said in October</a>. “It doesn’t have any censorship, so it has to be this way. These days, if you post a story pointing out a problem with the vaccine, you’re called a flat-earther, a denier, a propagator of fake news. People, Telegram is an alternative.”

An increasing number of Brazilians are inclined to agree. In 2018, the app was on only 15 percent of Brazilian phones, according to the <a href="https://www.mobiletime.com.br/pesquisas/mensageria-no-brasil-agosto-de-2021/" target="_blank">Brazilian research firm Mobile Time</a>. But by August this year, that number had risen to 53 percent. Analysts say the current figure should be higher now: The app gained <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/telegram-founder-says-over-70-mln-new-users-joined-during-facebook-outage-2021-10-05/" target="_blank">70 million followers</a> worldwide when Facebook and WhatsApp had an outage in October.

As Brazil’s challenges multiply, Bolsonaro’s fans call for a military takeover

The rise of Telegram has worried researchers who say it will be difficult to hold the company accountable. 

“That is the biggest fear,” said David Nemer, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. “They have no representation in Brazil. You can’t hold them accountable judicially. You can’t sue them.”

Brazilian officials and journalists have struggled to even make contact with the platform.

Telegram didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Those concerns have not stopped the flow of new users, particularly among Brazil’s right. Bolsonaro now has more than 1 million Telegram followers, making him one of the platform’s most followed politicians.

“We are being increasingly cut out of all social media,” said Carla Zambelli, a prominent conservative politician who has more than 100,000 followers on Telegram. “This isn’t something that’s theoretically happening. … It is happening in practice.”

So when Time opened up its poll to the public, the Bolsonaristas on Telegram were ready to mobilize.

Jonne Roriz

In recent years, the winner of the popular vote had been less divisive: The K-pop band BTS in 2018, the Hong Kong protesters in 2019, essential workers in 2020.

But this year, many on the Brazilian right saw it as an opportunity to prove Bolsonaro’s enduring political support — and thumb their nose at a magazine they considered a tool of the globalist left.

The Brazilian research group NetLab, which monitors right-wing activity on social media, saw the announcements light up Telegram, filling more than 100 groups. Many were large, with thousands of members. In each, the reader survey was posted an average of 20 to 80 times.

The chatter was only the “tip of the iceberg,” the group said in a statement. “But it serves as an autopsy of message circulation on the so-called ‘dark social.’”

Time didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Some Bolsonaro supporters have called for a military takeover of Brazil. Why do they wave the American flag?

Gilnei Lima, 54, a government worker in Brasilia, saw the solicitations. Lima, who participated in right-wing protests this year calling for the supreme court’s disbanding, said he quit Facebook and went to Telegram after his account was suspended several times. Now he participates in five conservative groups, free of fear of censorship.

He didn’t hesitate to vote for Bolsonaro to be named person of the year. He said it was important for the world to see that people in Brazil still support Bolsonaro. Recent opinion<b> </b>polls weighing presidential candidates here have shown Bolsonaro far behind former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. But Lima called them “lying and false.”

“The researchers and media doesn’t show the truth about Bolsonaro,” he said. “And the truth is that he would win any election under any circumstances.”

And one of the biggest tools he will use, said Sílvia Rodrigues Farias, a Bolsonaro supporter in northern Brazil, will be Telegram.

“There are huge groups forming, and it’s only getting bigger,” she said. “Next year, Telegram will be huge.”

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/28/brazil-acai-child-labor/" target=_blank>Small children are climbing 60-foot trees to harvest your açaí</a>

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/10/31/brazil-amazon-christian-missionary/" target=_blank>U.S. missionaries have long tried to convert the ‘unreached’ in the Amazon. Now Indigenous groups are fighting back.</a>

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/06/04/coronavirus-brazil-cat-island/?itid=ap_terrencemccoy">People have abandoned hundreds of cats on a deserted Brazilian island. Officials aren’t sure how to save them.</a>

2013 Livingston Award for Young Journalists, finalist

2013 Sigma Delta Chi Award in feature writing

2013 Washington Post selection, one of the year's best nonfiction works

2014 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, Hunter College

2016 Edgar A. Poe Award, White House Correspondents' Association

2016 George Polk Award, regional reporting

2016 Heywood Broun Award, Newspaper Guild-Communications Workers of America

2016 Tobenkin Award for reporting on racial discrimination, Columbia University

2016 NABJ Solute to Excellence Award, investigative reporting 

2017 Best American Newspaper Narrative, first place, Mayborne Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest

2017 Livingston Award for Young Journalists, finalist

2017 Best American Sports Writing

2018 Scripps Howard, Ernie Pyle Award, finalist

2019 Meyer “Mike” Berger Award

2020 Overseas Press Club Kim Wall Award, citation

2023 Nina Mason Pulliam Award for Outstanding Environmental Reporting 

2023 Gerald Loeb Award, International Reporting

2023 Michael Kelly Award, finalist

2023 George Polk Award, environmental reporting

2023 Overseas Press Club Award, best reporting in any medium on Latin America

2023 Pulitzer Prize, finalist in explanatory reporting

The Playground

University of Iowa, BA, political science and journalism

Columbia University, MA, international politics and journalism

Terrence McCoy is The Washington Post's Rio de Janeiro Bureau Chief. He has twice won the George Polk Award and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2023.