Last November, Brazil’s first lady was involved in an unusual altercation during the G-20 Summit in Rio de Janeiro. During a panel about disinformation, Janja Lula da Silva was defending tougher social media regulation when she heard a loud noise in the background. “I think it’s Elon Musk,” she said. “I’m not afraid of you…fuck you, Elon Musk.”

To which the X owner replied on his own social media platform: “They are going to lose the next election.”

The exchange reveals more than a gaffe committed by Brazil’s first lady. It shows how much the world’s most outspoken tech mogul pays attention to my country. Why would Elon Musk, who is set to lead something called the Department of Government Efficiency in the incoming Trump administration, care who wins the next election down here? Well, he does care, and so should every journalist who covers the information wars. After Trump’s comeback, Brazil is next.

Over the past few years, a series of crises have taken place here, a country where 84% of the population (212 million people) uses the internet and where, according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, 74% get news online.

Like the U.S., Brazil has seen a political group make use of disinformation as a tool to gain power and attack enemies, the press, and other institutions. Led by former president Jair Bolsonaro, several well-mapped disinformation campaigns managed to erode popular support for the electoral system, and sow doubts about the possibility of fraud in the 2022 elections.

The former president and his followers used the cry of “fake news” to attack the Supreme Court and the Electoral Court, and to instigate an insurrection that tried to overthrow the newly elected government of Luis Inácio “Lula.” The similarities between the Capitol invasion of January 6, 2021 in the U.S., and the invasion of government buildings in Brasilia on January 8, 2023, are so striking that one could say both leaders followed the same playbook to subvert a legitimate election.

But, after the coup attempt failed, Brazil took a different route altogether. While in the U.S., the judicial system moved slowly, Brazil’s Federal Police built quite a strong case against Bolsonaro, with thousands of messages, documents, and testimonies informing an indictment against the former president. Even before that, in 2023, Bolsonaro had been banned from running for office again. In February, this year, his passport was seized. He cannot flee the country. Bolsonaro has adopted a narrative in which he is the victim of an “authoritarian” Supreme Court that wants to censor his freedom of speech.

Meanwhile, Brazilian journalists have learned a lot about how digital populists are using media manipulation to destroy democracy. We’ve adopted a variety of strategies to deal with disinformation campaigns. We know how to quickly identify a fake news campaign online and its culprits, as well as how to reduce the use of the mainstream media to spread them. We have learned to combine data journalism with shoe leather reporting to identify how these misinformation networks are formed, coordinated, and funded — often with public money. We have adopted concepts from academia and allied ourselves with some of the key experts in the field of disinformation. We have created and shared methodologies to establish what is a simple organic misinformation wave and what is a systematic, structured, disinformation campaign. We developed linguistic models, monitoring stations, and AI-powered tools to help out.

We’ve come a long way.

Other institutions have also tried to fight back. Once again moving in a different direction than the U.S., our Congress responded to Jan. 8 by trying to regulate Big Tech to improve safeguards for users and establish the corporations’ responsibility for criminal content spread by their algorithms. The move was seen as crucial to these platforms’ agendas because Brazil is one of their largest markets. So the legislation was stonewalled by commercial interests. Google went as far as to use its search homepage, used by more than 90% of internet users in Brazil, to say that a draft bill would “make the internet worse.”

That’s when Elon Musk enters the stage.

Doubling down on an already explosive political situation, earlier this year he decided to confront the Supreme Court and accuse its most prominent justice, Alexandre de Moraes, of “censoring” X after he refused to suspend accounts that were spreading disinformation and threats against authorities. Claiming his “absolutist” defense of freedom of speech, Musk joined the Brazilian alt-right in calling Moraes “a dictator.”

The beef escalated with the closure of X’s offices in Brazil, which was followed by the suspension of the platform in the entire country for over a month. In the end, Musk backed down, appointed a legal representative in the country, and paid a fine, and the service was reestablished.

Just like the Supreme Court, the federal government has not backed down on its quest to confront Big Tech. Just a month later, Lula’s administration led the G-20 meeting and managed to insert the need for social media and AI regulation in the final draft signed by 80-plus countries.

While it’s unlikely that Big Tech regulation will advance in Trump’s U.S., Brazil, the hemisphere’s second-largest democracy, has a civil society and a free press that has learned the urgency of establishing rules in the digital far west.

Unfortunately, we also know that it won’t be easy, and that tech oligarchs such as Musk will continue to pay special attention to Brazil. They know that what happens here could influence the entire region — and maybe the world.

This is a battle for the future of information integrity, journalism, and democracy. If humanity is to overcome the unprecedented threat of weaponized disinformation and digital populism, Brazil is an essential fort to be held. That is why my prediction for journalism in 2025 — or maybe it’s wishful thinking — is that all eyes of the global media should be focused on what happens in Brazil.