Brazil’s most influential political messaging is increasingly appearing in an unlikely place: Instagram gossip accounts best known for tracking the beach bodies and love lives of celebrities.
Late last year, some of these accounts began featuring a less glamorous — but far more powerful — figure: Gov. Tarcísio de Freitas of São Paulo.
@alfinetei, which has more than 25 million followers, shared a video of Freitas and a motorcycle messenger celebrating a local tax cut for motorcyclists. @garotxdoblog, with 1.2 million followers, posted images of the governor inaugurating a new stretch of São Paulo’s Rodoanel beltway. And @exclusivasdafama, with more than 9.1 million followers, reported that he had mobilized police forces to combat gender-based violence. The post ended with a clapping emoji.
Representatives for Freitas, who’s a member of former President Jair Bolsonaro’s Republicans Party and is running for reelection in October, denied his office commissioned the posts, according to an investigation by Piauí magazine.
Still, the posts highlight how Brazil’s celebrity gossip accounts are blurring the line between entertainment and news, becoming a powerful and lightly scrutinized channel for political image-making ahead of the country’s elections.
Many of these accounts imitate journalistic practices, but frequently spread misinformation, said Rogério Christofolleti, an ethics professor at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina.
“From the point of view of journalistic ethics, it's quite complicated,” Christofolleti said in an interview with LatAm Journalism Review (LJR). “Information should only be published when it has been verified, when it has substance, when it has informational density.”
Memes and news
Gossip accounts frequently have greater reach than legacy news outlets. Of Brazil’s top 20 Instagram publishers, four are accounts that frequently use news and memes to engage audiences, according to social media tracker Zeeng. They are Alfinetei, with 25 million followers, Gina Indelicada with 12.5 million, Central da Fama with 5.7 million, and Subcelebrities with 4.5 million.
That’s in part because Brazilians have come to rely on social media to stay informed. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism for 2025 shows that 33% of Brazilian respondents say they follow creators and influencers, while 30% say they follow news brands and journalists.
News making has become more dynamic with the ubiquitousness of social media, according to Eduardo Prange, a big data researcher at Zeeng. Publishers have to adapt to formats more keen on summarization.
“We have a primary informational culture here in Brazil, which is through memes. I think memes are the key starting point for any conversation,” Prange told LJR. “When the conversation heats up, it can even reverberate into more traditional content formats, but the triggers for engagement, interaction, dispersion and virality come almost entirely from memes.”
This is especially pressing as data shows Brazil is a prolific country for social content creators, with over 2 million, making it one of the world's biggest markets. Journalism is still trying to catch on, in a wave that is redefining the relationship between journalists and newsrooms.
Carolina Terra, a University of São Paulo digital communications researcher, told LJR that, even though these types of gossip pages often use the news, they do not share the commitment or ethical and journalistic principles as legacy outlets.
“The more engagement, the more visibility, the better for them,” Terra said. “They understood that it would also be interesting for them to go beyond this coverage of the lives of celebrities and subcelebrities.”
One of Terra’s graduate students, Nathália Sanches, developed the concept of "depersonalized account,” meaning pages that are more akin to brands and have no clear person behind them. These accounts are what she calls “algorithmic hubs,” or labs for viralization, she said.
“Since they do not have the commitment of personality (no one demands ethics from a faceless logo), they are used tactically to test narratives,” Sanches told LJR. “They sacrifice ethics, truth, journalistic verification in exchange for distribution efficiency.”
One agency’s standards
No celebrity and gossip account managers responded to requests from LJR to understand whether and how they apply journalistic standards in their daily practices.
But Banca Digital, one of Brazil’s biggest online marketing agencies, with over 50 accounts, has faced issues of unsubstantiated rumours getting amplified that have led to internal changes.
In 2023, an account Banca had previously represented called Choquei, which now has 27 million followers, published false information about an alleged affair between a Brazilian influencer and a female fan.
The repercussions led to the then 22-year-old woman committing suicide. Police concluded the woman had started the rumors, and Choquei faced no criminal liability but was heavily criticized for spreading false rumors.
Even though Choquei was not a Banca client at the time, other smaller gossip pages from their roster did amplify the misinformation. This led to an internal search for accountability at Banca Digital.
“Everyone has a responsibility, so if a crisis happens, everyone has to stop and observe,” Alberto Pereira Jr., marketing and journalism director at Banca Digital, told LJR in an interview. He confirmed that Banca was directly reached by emissaries of São Paulo’s governor to do posts with the accounts they represent, but the company declined.
Banca created both an internal protocol and a guiding book for its roster. The first aims to identify the circulation of false information or sensitive content that could have adverse effects on the ‘quality of public discourse.’ According to the company, since the protocol was adopted, more than 60 pieces of content have been taken down and around 200 publications have undergone some form of rectification.
The booklet, shared with LJR, shows a batch of good editorial practices. Pereira also said a journalist is always available to advise the accounts.
Basic fact-checking, crediting the source, respecting copyright, contextualizing the post, respecting privacy, correcting mistakes, clearly identifying paid posts – these are 101 for journalists but that might be new information for digital creators.
“We want to work on prevention,” Pereira said. “It's better than having to chase the consequences later and archiving it, especially since once the post is down, we know it's already out there.”
For Christofolleti, it's important that those interested in good journalism as a whole pay attention in this election year. He said the São Paulo case is a disinformation campaign.
“They use these outlets, which are not journalistic outlets,” Christofolleti said. They’re “outlets that often belong to celebrities or cover celebrities, to address issues that are alien to them.”
