So you can imagine my pleasant surprise as the vote tallies came in and the liberal Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva broke out of a narrow race to win handily. As Lula celebrates another term in office, Flávio has lammed it to Florida, hoping that the Trump administration will lick his wounds. As The New Republic’s Perry Bacon wrote, Lula’s shock victory was both “a win for democracy” and “an important defeat for global villains” like Trump. But it also gives us much to ponder about how this win was pulled off and what lessons we can take from it.
Lula’s Army messages often included ready-made templates for followers to share with friends and family. Each one assigned supporters a specific task aimed at boosting Lula’s visibility on social media. Janones frequently instructed his “troops” to “blow up” the latest campaign video or help a new hashtag “take off.”
As the report notes, it is “notoriously difficult” to assess the role that social media plays in election results. That Lula’s Army was active in ground-level organizing and voter recruitment is just as important as liking and favoriting campaign videos. Plus, it takes two to tango: Lula’s successes were somewhat dependent on Bolsonaro’s failings. But if the social media battlefront was insignificant, then we wouldn’t be staring at reports accusing Meta of putting its finger on the algorithmic scale on Bolsonaro’s behalf.
Can this sort of political organizing work in the United States? It already is. As The New York Times reported in September, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has an army of social media influencers who dutifully promote his content and accomplishments. “The administration regularly sends the influencers memos on the mayor’s priorities and encourages them to trumpet his accomplishments, all outside of public scrutiny. The missives are delivered in group chats on Signal, an encrypted messaging app designed to shield posts from public review.”
As someone who is frequently dismayed by how Democrats too often seem to not understand the modern media landscape and how to exploit it, what Mamdani is doing is precisely the sort of thing that feels ripe and timely. And if anything, the people they need to reach are already there, waiting for them to connect. Over the past few years, armies of this nature have been forming all around us. In Minneapolis, the anti-ICE movement has used the same tools to keep watch over its neighborhoods, direct support to families in fear, and mobilize for street protests. And as TNR contributor Dan Froomkin reports, the No Kings movement and its affiliated allies are planning to continue their robust organizing after the midterms in the furtherance of a bold agenda that Democrats can run and win on in 2028 by building the “permanent field campaign” once envisioned by Obama insiders, which ended up falling by the wayside.
All that said, there’s a broader lesson to be taken from the exploits of Lula’s Army and its online organizing. It’s pretty clear to me that the United States’ Silicon Valley oligarchy, which backs Trump’s MAGA forces and is skeptical of democracy, has designed its various platforms and algorithmic traps to keep people isolated and despondent, doomscrolling instead of hoping, and scraping what meager dopamine hits we can from a narrowing band of content. This suits authoritarians well: Politics is a hard road in a free society; when you feel alone, it can seem even more hopeless.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
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