Investigated Content: One matter published on the Compre Rural website and posted on social media on the page whose title states that the presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) and the Landless Workers Movement (MST) said that “agribusiness must be eliminated from the land”. .”
where it was published: On the Compre Rural Portal and on the website profile on Instagram. On the social network, the content was later deleted.
Completion of Proof: It is false content that circulates on the internet attributing to Lula and the MST the statement that “agribusiness must be eliminated from the Earth”.
Compre Rural explains, in a footnote on the site, that the text in question is a republication of an article opinion of columnist JR Guzzo for the newspaper Gazeta do Povo. In the original version, published on August 1 of this year, the title is different: “What Lula will do to Brazilian agribusiness, at the request of the MST”. Thus, in the original title, there is no attribution to the PT and to the movement that talks about eliminating agribusiness, although, in the body of the text, Guzzo writes that the MST wants to eliminate agribusiness in Brazil and that Lula wants to give the movement a prominent role. in the government.
When checking Comprova, the team did not find a public record of Lula or MST representatives explicitly calling for the elimination of agribusiness.
The rest of the text is identical to the opinion article published in Gazeta do Povo. Comprova does not check opinion pieces or content published by journalistic organizations. according to editorial policythe proves understands that “these organizations can make mistakes, but they are expected to have their own error correction policies”.
For Comprova, false is content invented or edited to change its original meaning and deliberately released to spread a falsehood.
Scope of publication: Compre Rural’s verified page engaged more than 3,650 users on Facebook. There were more than 1 thousand comments spread across 28 different posts by pages that add up to more than 2 million followers. The content has been shared nearly 1,500 times as of the publication of this verification.
What the author of the publication says: Through emails informed on the website and by message on Instagram, Comprova contacted Compre Rural, but did not receive a response to the questions until the publication of this verification.
How do we check: We searched Google for the phrase, as stated in the title of the article, “agribusiness must be eliminated from the Earth”, attributed by Compre Rural to Lula and the MST. We also searched for the keywords, “agribusiness”, “Lula”, “MST” and “eliminate”, separately. We use search refinement techniques, in particular the use of quotation marks (“ ”), which leads Google to search for documents that have the word, phrase or phrase exactly as it is inside the quotation marks. We also use the term “AND” between keywords to search for content that had more than one keyword searched at the same time.
There is no public record of MST representatives calling for the elimination of agribusiness or calling the sector an “enemy of the Brazilian people”
The title of the article published in Compre Rural attributes to Lula and the MST the following line: “Agribusiness must be eliminated from the Earth”. Searching Google for the phrase, as attributed literally, there is no record attesting to its veracity. On the contrary, many responses are articles by checking agencies – such as to the facts, Reuters, Yahoo and Rumors.org – contradicting the content of the Compre Rural.
We also obtained as a result a note published on Lula’s official website denying the attribution of speech.
In addition to the exact phrase, as stated in the title of the Compre Rural article, Google search for the keywords “agribusiness”, “Lula”, “MST” and “eliminate”, separately. Google did not return any articles attesting to the finding in the title.
why do we investigate: We investigated suspicious content that went viral on social media about the presidential elections, the covid-19 pandemic and public policies of the federal government. In the case of the material investigated, we saw that the publication had repercussions on social networks, attributing to the presidential candidate Lula a speech in favor of the elimination of agribusiness. Pieces of disinformation like this can disrupt the electoral process because they deceive the population, who must make their choice based on true and reliable data.
Other checks on the topic: Verified content has also been debunked by other fact-checking services like to the facts, Reuters, Yahoo, Magnifying glass and Rumors.org.
Recently, Comprova checked other issues that tried to attribute false statements to the candidate Lula. In one of them, it was proved that Lula did not say he wanted to implant Chinese communism in Brazil. In another check, Comprova found that it was false that Lula and the president-elect of Colombia want to force people to share a house with other families.
Investigated by Portal Norte, Imirante.com and Crusoé. Verified by Correio do Estado, PLURAL Curitiba, CBN Cuiabá, Estadão, Piauí, A Gazeta, Folha de S. Paulo, O Popular and Jornal do Commercio.
Source: CNN Brasil
