After the elections in 2018, when she launched herself as a vice-presidential candidate alongside the left-winged candidate Fernando Haddad, from the Workers' Party (PT), she became the target of a huge influx of fake news that spread throughout Brazil. False rumours, conspiracy theories, misleading propaganda and manipulated photos and videos started to circulate over Facebook and the mobile-messaging app WhatsApp. Suddenly, Manuela's pictures were being shared all over the country. Except that she wasn't herself in them. In one of the images, her healthy complexion was replaced by huge dark circles under her eyes. Her chest and left arm were covered with fake tattoos of Ernesto Che Guevara, one of the leaders of the Cuban Revolution, and the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. A presidential sash was also digitally included around her neck.

"I understand the anger that I cause in people who do such a thing", says D'Ávila. "I am a free, happy, personally and politically accomplished woman. Nothing can create more anger and insecurity than a woman who loves herself and who builds a life full of accomplishments like me and so many of us", she adds.

Despite also being harmed by the propagation of fake news during the last elections, the nature of the attacks suffered by her counterpart Fernando Haddad was fundamentally distinct. The false rumours spread against him concerned mostly his agenda, if elected president, his political background and accusations of involvement in corruption scandals. The lies invented about Manuela D'Ávila, on the other hand, were more personal – they involved her image, her personality, her morals and her competency to be Brazil's next vice-president. "Why is that?", someone might ask. Why were they targeted by fake news in a different manner, even though they were part of the same presidential candidacy?

The answer is quite simple: Fernando Haddad is a man. Manuela D'Ávila is a woman. And despite its image of open-mindedness, Brazil is still a country built upon deeply rooted patriarchal values, with a society that refuses to abandon its traditional views on gender roles, how men and women should behave, and what is to be expected of them.

Fake news played a huge role in Brazil's last presidential elections, one of the most polarized in recent history. What should have been a debate of ideas under the public eye became a political battleground that flooded the internet and cellphones of the Brazilian electorate with false and ill-intended rumours. That happened because the main candidates were representatives of very different shares of the country's voters.

On one side, Fernando Haddad, former Minister of Education, defended the ideals of the left-winged Workers' Party and Brazil's former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, currently arrested under accusations of corruption. On the other end stood the far-right populist candidate Jair Bolsonaro, from the Social Liberal Party (PSL), known for his support of the military dictatorship that reigned in Brazil from 1964 to 1985, and for repeated complaints of hate speech towards Afro-Brazilian communities, indigenous populations and women. In the end, Bolsonaro won. But what was the role that fake news played in it?

A study conducted by the technology company MindMiners in 2018 revealed that 83% of the voters interviewed confirmed using social media as a main source of information. That is particularly concerning taking into consideration that 92% of the Brazilians, according to another poll done by the BBC World Service in 2017, reported a concern about not being able to discern between fact and falsehood online.

"Fake news was determinant as war weapons in this elections because they helped to consolidate an imaginary about the candidates involved in the dispute", explains the expert on media ethics Rafiza Varão, professor at the Communication Faculty of the University of Brasília (UnB). According to her, very little could have been done to avoid the problem in the short term, since the false stories were propagated extensively through encrypted WhatsApp groups. "This episode shows that, once again, the regulation of companies that own social media is urgent", considers Danusa Marques, professor at the Institute of Political Science of UnB. "If the manipulation of it to trace consumerism patterns was the concern before, today it is evident that there is a high risk of manipulation of social media to obtain political gains", she clarifies.

While the spread of fake news in Brazil during 2018's presidential elections is certainly a compelling subject, what has hardly ever been addressed by research is how these fake news were affected by gender bias, reflecting a Brazilian society that is entrenched in patriarchal vestiges. According to 2018's Global Gender Gap Report, compiled every year by the World Economic Forum, within 149 countries, Brazil ranks at 95 when it comes to gender equality. The study looks at all the globe and categorizes countries on a scale from zero to one in terms of women's economic participation, educational attainment, health, and political empowerment. The closer to one, the smaller should be the gender gap. Brazil's score is 0.681.

In politics, a field historically dominated by men, women are still seen as outsiders. Although they make up 52% of Brazil's electorate, female representation in ministerial posts dropped from a 25,6% in 2014 to 4% in 2017, according to a report by the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the United Nations. In the Chamber of Deputies, they currently fill only 15% of the seats – among 513 federal deputies, 77 are women. At the Senate, the percentage of women is 13%. They are 7 between 54 senators.

The tough routine of being a woman in Brazilian politics is no stranger to Manuela D'Ávila. Nor is it being a victim of fake news. Ever since she was first elected as a councilwoman in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul in 2004, she has been the target of dozens of false rumours, photo and video edits. However, never with the same intensity of last year's attacks, when she got under the spotlights after campaigning for the vice-presidency.

"Chauvinism and misogyny keep going at full force", she vented on her Facebook page after exposing the photo montage where tattoos were added to her picture. "After reading a newspaper article about my hair (yes! A female candidate's hair is a subject... of a male candidate? Never!) now they start with the manipulated photos", she wrote. Other fake news that circulated about her were more serious, like the hoaxes connecting her to the attempted murder of Jair Bolsonaro during the presidential campaign.

This scenery motivated her to launch the institute E Se Fosse Você?, translated as "what if it were you?", an initiative that aims to promote a debate about fake news and how to fight their dissemination over social media. "In 2018 I was a target of every type of montage. They destroyed my body, manipulated my words and made acquaintances to break relationships with me for believing in fake news", recalls D'Ávila. "What if it were you, having your words manipulated, would it be funny? What if it were you being assaulted while holding your child, would it be casual? What if it were you defending an idea that you believe, and people tried to embarrass you and attack your family? How would you feel?", she questions.

According to Rafiza Varão, fake news targeted at women tries to demoralize them by appealing to stereotypes that go against the construction of the "good woman", a female ideal that is decisively sexist. It is what has been done to Manuela D'Ávila and so many other women that dared to venture in a typically masculine environment: politics. "Her image was manipulated several times to spread the message of a candidate that does not fit within the ideals of what a respectable woman should be", evaluates the expert on media ethics and fake news.

The gender stereotypes that influenced the dissemination of biased fake news did not come out of nowhere, of course. They persist in the way that newspapers and the media portray women, especially those in positions of power. A study published in 2015 by Aimée Montiel has stated how news media organizations have the power to reinforce gender inequality through the dissemination of stereotypes. Another research, this time conducted by Mercy Ette, from the University of Huddersfield (UK), has analysed the spatial representation of Nigerian female politicians in news media. What the paper showed is that not only women occupy limited space in the news, but they are also marginalised despite decades of advocacy for gender equality.

Brazil is no different in that matter, what becomes obvious when analysing how media and the society painted a mainly negative portrait of Brazil's former president Dilma Rousseff. In an article titled "The Patriarchy's Revenge: How Retro-Macho Politics Doomed Dilma Rousseff", the professor of political studies Omar Encarnación argued that a backlash of male-dominated politics was responsible for the impeachment trial that removed her from office in 2016. "There are certain elements of machismo and misogyny in this impeachment", said Dilma herself after the process was over. "I have always been described as a hard woman. Yet I have never heard a man described as a hard man", she contended.

Constantly criticized for her looks, for being too serious and lacking charisma, Dilma Rousseff was also targeted with sexist remarks and gender stereotypes by mainstream media outlets. An article from Época magazine titled "Dilma and sex" faulted the president for eliminating "her erotic side by wearing clothes that conceal her sensuality". Veja weekly magazine compared Rousseff's appearance to the 33-year-old wife of the vice-president Michel Temer, Marcela. A cover story from the magazine IstoÉ went even further, describing the president as a woman who had "successive nervous explosions" and demonstrated "a complete disconnect with reality".

"Gender stereotypes are continually mobilized by Brazilian traditional media. During the coup of 2016, the coverage about the deposed president Dilma Rousseff was hateful, as caricatured as many aspects of the coverage on female candidates in 2018's elections", adds the professor Danusa Marques, expert in feminism and politics.

The resonance between what happened in Dilma Rousseff's case and the US' 2016 presidential elections is uncanny. Over there, the campaign was also filled with sexism and misogyny. On more than one occasion, Donald Trump suggested that Hillary Clinton's gender rendered her unfit for governing. "I just don't think she has a presidential look, and you need a presidential look", he said once. The US' 2016 elections were also plagued by fake news. Stories about Hillary Clinton's frailty, untrustworthiness, and possibly even criminality, were amplified on social networks. Making an analogy between the US and the Brazilian case, the influence of a media landscape that perpetuates gender stereotypes about women in politics in the dissemination of fake news affected by gender bias becomes clearer.

According to a study conducted by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, US' traditional media outlets circulated more news that disfavoured Hillary Clinton over her male counterpart, Donald Trump. To come to this conclusion, they analysed several stories published about both candidates and categorized them into either describing a scandal or policy issues. Surprisingly, they found roughly four times as many Clinton-related stories that talked about scandals as opposed to policies. Given the number of scandals in which Trump was implicated during the campaign, it is quite alarming that the media devoted more attention to his controversial policies.

In a paper titled "America clearly is not ready for a female president: why?", the researchers Abby Corrington and Michelle Hebl argued that the US electorate voted the way they did in 2016 for reasons that were ancillary to the role that gender bias and stereotypes played in it. They concluded their study with a call to action: more women need to participate in politics, each and every one of us must recognize our own sexism and subtle biases – and make others aware of their own as well, and the public must acknowledge and change the double standards that exist out there for women, but not for men.

Raising the representativeness of women in politics is vital in the fight against patriarchy, misogyny, gender stereotypes and, as we have seen throughout this feature, even fake news. It is important to note, however, that media's portrayal of women and female representation in politics walk alongside, hand in hand. As shown by a worldwide study conducted by the researchers Amanda Haraldsson and Lena Wängnerud, measuring the relationship between media sexism and the share of candidates for the lower chamber of national parliaments who are women, the higher the level of media sexism, the lower the share of women candidates.

"To fight for public policies that bring forward women issues it is important that a significant portion of these politicians are also women. Here, what is important is a place of speech and experience", considers Rafiza Varão. Professor Danusa Marques adds that there is no democracy without parity between genders. "A government of homogenous privileged in relation to class, race, gender and origins is an oligarchy", she concludes.