DOSSIER

DIGITAL LIFE

Is big tech trying to shut down democracy?

ver the last two decades, Brazil has become something of an emblem of the global battle for digital sovereignty. It is often referred to internationally as one of the few positive examples proving that countries in the Global South can and will fight back when provided with the necessary political will. For example, in 2024, Brazil was one of the few countries that strongly confronted Elon Musk’s extreme editorial decision to give free rein to many far-right accounts that had been banned before he took over Twitter and rebranded it X. Musk attacked the president of the country’s Supreme Court, Alexandre de Morais, but was ultimately forced to backtrack. That incident took place ten years after what remains the main exemplar of Brazil’s firmness on digital sovereignty, the Marco Civil da Internet (a civil rights framework for the internet), which was democratically established through open popular consultation and aimed to protect and regulate the internet market while promoting digital inclusion. At that time, while Dilma Rousseff’s administration still leaned left and the local far-right was virtually non-existent, it did indeed feel like Brazil would illuminate the global path to a more democratic digital environment.  

But sovereignty is a tricky business — and even more so when one’s claims for it lead to a coup d’état, such as the one that took place in 2016, ousting the very president who had presented our digital sovereign legislation just two years beforehand. Beyond the coup, putschist president Michel Temer’s ‘Bridge to the Future’ and constitutional cap on public investment, Bolsonaro’s tragic handling of the pandemic, of diplomacy, of the economy, of human rights and pretty much all his presidential attributions; and Lula’s shy, liberal, US-aligned third term, Brazil’s drive towards digital sovereignty looks like a pale blue dot lost in the outer space of more contemporary problems — many of them also involving sovereignty.   

In 2025, for instance, as Brazil’s traditional primary export commodities, such as coffee and meat, were struck by Donald Trump’s tariff war, under the stated grounds of retaliation against the so-called ‘persecution’ of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, Brasília appears to have sidelined digital sovereignty even more, in the name of securing ‘broader’ economic sovereignty. Finance minister Fernando Haddad’s pet project that offers Brazilian land — and fresh water — for big tech companies to build highly polluting data centres (in exchange for virtually nothing, as even gathered user data will remain in the possession of the Silicon Valley giants) moved out of the spotlight of criticism as Brazil fought to keep its primary export goods afloat. The struggle to mitigate the impact of Trump’s tariff war also provided Brazil with the perfect excuse to abdicate from its regional leadership regarding Washington’s belligerence towards Venezuela, Colombia, and even Mexico. Amid Trump’s economic war, Brazil’s stance as an agrarian-exporting powerhouse became synonymous with ‘sovereignty’, relegating other areas of national defence concerns, such as the digital and diplomatic aspects, to secondary positions.   

But even if we disregard the recent events that led to Brazil partially sidelining its commitment to digital sovereignty, can we really consider this country to be a successful case of struggle against the ever-growing big tech appetite for monopoly building and deregulation? According to a study produced in a joint venture by the Universities of São Paulo and Brasília, local and federal administrations in Brazil have paid over R$ 23 billion (Brazilian Reais) in big tech software licenses (nearly half of that money spent in the twelve months between June 2024 and June 2025). Such an amount would be enough not only to develop Brazil’s own national software landscape, but also to power it with eighty-six high-end locally built data centres 5MW Tier 3, raising in fifty percent, with public infrastructure, the current number of such facilities — which, by the way, are all private. Unfortunately, as already mentioned, Lula’s government chose the opposite path and instead of creating a national infrastructure that could potentially secure Brazilian people’s data sovereignty, signed a bill that will grant fiscal advantages for big techs to build, operate and own their own data centres on Brazilian soil, while keeping their ownership of the data. 

Brazil’s digital sovereignty is not merely given away willingly, though. Strong pressure is behind a decision such as the aforementioned, through which the State ends up effectively sponsoring big tech to extract data from its own people, while polluting its own land. In any dependent capitalist economy, US digital firms have been able to proliferate and thrive — with different levels of success; under a multitude of legislative/economic configurations — through exerting systematic and widespread communicational and political pressure on policymakers, media and societies as a whole. In Brazil’s particular case, Big Techs have consistently invested resources in both lobbying to water down the regulation of any activities they might find profitable, no matter how harmful or immoral they can get, and sustaining their own image as a beacon of economic opportunities for workers and enterprises alike. 

Uber is one such company. Through a mix of lobbying operations and sustained disinformation campaigns, the big tech who’s very brand became synonymous with contemporary precarity has managed to colonize Brazilian transportation landscape, severely reducing wages and crippling the labor movement’s traditional levers — all while sustaining an image of ‘entrepreneurial freedom’ haven, effective even among many of the workers whose exploitation it has taken to new levels. In this article, we’ll analyse the company’s lobbying and miscommunication strategies through the conceptual lens of digital sovereignty, as well as the consequential impact it had over Brazilian economy and society. And the broader guiding question we put forward, with no real pretension for a definitive answer, is: how willing and capable are both the Brazilian government and society to sovereignly face off the big tech juggernauts, eventually protecting its economy, environment and society? And more broadly, can digital sovereignty co-exist with these companies, or must they be expelled altogether for sovereignty to thrive in a dependent capitalist country such as Brazil?  

Digital Predators...In the last decade, people and goods transportation applications invaded the whole capitalist world with promises of flexible work, high individual profit margins, and the realisation of the dream of being ‘one’s own boss’. Seduced by these promises — and the perspective of quickly lowering unemployment rates without actually having to create new jobs or invest new money — the administrations of several major Latin American cities clashed with traditional taxi drivers and opened the door for these foreign companies to operate with little or no regulation. A decade later, these societies are hooked and can no longer live without Uber, iFood, and similar services. 

Like other ‘sharing economy’ firms, ride-hailing companies such as Uber are famous for employing scorched-earth tactics: they kick off by promoting dumping in the target market, quickly rendering competition unviable, and then, with their monopoly established, they subject all actors — from workers themselves to government agents, including users and the legislative branch — to their own rules and market practices. When governments approach them with a tolerant mindset, they simply dominate the workspace, rendering later capping regulation virtually impossible. For example, statistical evolution shows how ineffective the São Paulo city government’s late effort at balance was: in 2015, the number of app drivers exceeded taxi drivers by 12,000, and by 2023, the number of rides in app-based cars surpassed those in public transportation in Greater São Paulo.

The consequences for taxi workers in Brazil have been harsh. A dossier published in May 2024 by IPEA (Institute of Applied Economic Research) shows that from 2012 to 2015, the passenger transport sector employed about 400,000 drivers, with an average monthly income of around R$3,100. By 2022, when the sector employed nearly a million workers, the average income fell below R$2,400. Workers who engaged in collective struggles for greater dignity at work were also penalised in the most arbitrary ways, from termination or suspension to death threats, including online smear campaigns against their struggles.. Even the ’well-behaved’ were punished: contrary to labour laws, the hourly earnings of drivers and motorcycle couriers consistently declined over time.  

Pension coverage was also affected: in 2015, 47.8 percent of passenger drivers contributed. Seven years later, this percentage was nearly halved to 24.8 percent. As IPEA’sresearch concludes, beyond the ’growing precarity of working conditions’, there is ’a situation in which workers subjected to a real condition of subordinate (and precarious) work reproduce the narrative (or ideology) that has been widely disseminated and assume they are ‘entrepreneurs of themselves.’ All in all, the much-celebrated arrival of these ride-hailing firms to Brazil has resulted in a worsening of the conditions of work for taxi drivers, while political authorities have offered very little resistance to these changes. If the effects have been so negative, why has there been so little resistance to the influence of Uber and other firms?

Uberpropaganda...An important piece of the answer to this apparent enigma has to do with the way in which ride-hailing firms and other big tech firms operating in the sharing economy wage systematic ‘influence’ campaigns, which involve lobbying of politicians and disinformation to steer the public in their favour. Brazilian independent investigative agency Agência Pública revealed a scheme of co-optation and disinformation targeting iFood app workers, coordinated by advertising agencies hired by the platform. The goal was to dissuade workers from joining protests organised by groups like Entregadores Antifascistas (Antifascist Delivery Workers) and the Associação dos Motofretistas de Aplicativos e Autônomos do Brasil (AMA-BR, Association of Application and Independent Motorcycle Couriers of Brazil), which fought for higher delivery fees, Covid-19 prevention measures, and better working conditions.

The disinformation project included infiltrators in protests and political Instagram pages like ’Garfo na caveira’ (‘Fork in the skull’) and ’Não breca meu trampo’ (‘don’t stop my hustle’) created eight days after the mobilisation that paralysed over ten Brazilian states and became known as  ‘Breque nos apps’ (A Break on the Apps). The monitoring of activists and anti-protest propaganda lasted at least a year, according to the report. In one of the meetings disclosed by Pública, coordinators from Benjamim Comunicação, hired by iFood, celebrated how the campaign ’killed’ one of the movement’s leaders, motoboy Paulo Lima, known as Galo, from Entregadores Antifascistas. The strategy corresponds to a practice known as ‘marketing 4.0’, which involves promoting an idea or product without revealing who is behind it.

A few months after this campaign, in September 2022, The Intercept brought to light a draft bill written by iFood itself, aimed at preventing the recognition of an employment relationship by creating a new worker category: the ‘independent service provider’  The idea was to replace the employer-employee relationship with a ‘commercial partnership’, which would guarantee social security contributions for workers — and nothing else. The bill was to be presented by Deputy Luiza Canziani of the PSD (the Social-Democratic Party, which is right-wing, despite the name), president since 2021 of the Digital Front, a group of lawmakers backed by companies like Google and iFood. The content generator for this legislative bloc is the Instituto Cidadania Digital (Digital Citizenship Institute), a think tank co-owned by João Sabino, who also serves as iFood’s director of public policy. The group of lawmakers, which does not hide its preference for legislating in favour of apps and big tech, was dubbed the ‘Like Caucus’ by The Intercept.

These pressure campaigns have been immensely successful in either completely blocking or at least limiting the scope of regulatory initiatives which would have interfered with the interests of big tech. Despite promises by the new government of Lula to finally make progress in terms of regulating digital platforms, big tech firms are still managing to get their way.  During the 2022 presidential election campaign — a year that began with the number of platform workers surpassing 1.5 million — then-candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva promised to promote extensive debate for drafting new labour legislation, with special attention to entrepreneurs, platform workers, domestic workers, and home-based workers. On the first day of his government, former metalworker Luiz Marinho, during his inauguration as Minister of Labour and Employment, advocated for the regulation of app-based work. That same January, the federal government created a Forum with about fifty researchers to discuss not only the regulation of app-based work but also the platforms themselves. 

Countering the Blackmail of Big Tech...The sluggish progress and blockage of the legislation are certainly influenced by corporate lobbying, which, although unregulated in Brazil, happens openly. And thanks to aforementioned smearing and disinformation campaigns did not need to rely on mass media campaigns: they legally participated in drafting the proposal itself. ‘We had lobbying that blocked the approval of Bill 2630, and now we’ve had lobbying that, instead of blocking a bill in Congress, influenced the very construction of this proposal’ , declared Fairwork researcher Jonas Valente in March 2024.

Watered down, Bill 12/2024 establishes a minimum wage of R$32.10 per hour for workers, proportionally equivalent to the national minimum wage — but only applicable between accepting a trip and reaching the destination. It also mandates social security contributions, with workers paying 7.5 percent and companies 20 percent. While there are modest advances, a fundamental impasse remains: the only measure that would truly guarantee labour dignity for platform work is recognising an employment relationship. On this front, the proposed legislation did little more than update iFood’s ‘independent service provider’ under the label of ‘platform-based self-employed worker’, a new category that, like its predecessor, avoids recognising any actual labour relationship between workers and platforms.

The stagnation of the legislation and the ineffectiveness of dialogue between workers and platforms led delivery workers to organise a new ‘Breque dos apps’ in March 2025. The strike occurred in about twenty state capitals between March 31 and April 1, demanding higher minimum delivery fees and pay per kilometre driven. In São Paulo, iFood met with some representatives after protests at the company’s headquarters in Osasco, a city in the metropolitan region. In an hour-long meeting, they reiterated their demands to João Sabino, the same iFood director of government and public relations, who said he would take the discussion to the board — without setting a date for another meeting.

In a statement, the Brazilian Association of Mobility and Technology (Amobitec), active in the working group that led to Bill 12/2024, said it respects the right to protest and that its member companies maintain open dialogue with workers. The same association expanded its government engagement in early 2025, partnering with the Ministry of Racial Equality to create anti-racism awareness content for drivers, delivery partners, and service users. The partnership is little more than a typical liberal diversity gesture — a placebo. After all, demands for employment recognition, class status, and other labour measures that would actually improve work quality and curb precarity remain ignored.

This pro-business watering down was predictable, given the lack of parity among stakeholders in Brazil’s working group. Even under traditional negotiation conditions between two class entities, parity would be unlikely. But in this case, the disparity was extreme, as workers are not even a formal category, let alone capable of bargaining power. However much it’s said that the ‘uberised’ worker ‘has no boss’, the boss is the app, which knows more about consumers and workers than either party knows about themselves — knowledge deep and broad enough to pit them against each other. This was the tactic that allowed iFood and others to completely water down not only Brazil’s regulatory proposal but also the organisation of its precariat workers as a class.

In this bleak scenario of government hesitation, compounded by class disorganisation and societal dependence, platforms have essentially taken the three previous spheres hostage. Some pressing questions then arise: how can conscious users, researchers, and other political actors oxygenate the existing resistance from the ground up, both in daily life and in movements like the ‘Breque dos apps’? How can a communications front counter the lobbying — both legislative and media — promoted by platform capitalists? How can lawmakers be convinced to measure precarity as such, not as employment? And finally, how can the social value of labour rights be reclaimed in an increasingly liberalised society? 

Brazil, a country that has in recent years demonstrated its desire — sometimes proudly, sometimes discreetly — to assert its national sovereignty vis-à-vis the interference of the US, and which has pursued a long-term agenda to move closer to the ambitious goal of digital sovereignty, offers us some food for thought about the difficulty of the contemporary technological terrain. Furthermore, it alerts us to the fact that any politician or activist who wants to achieve even limited elements of digital sovereignty needs to prepare for a major communication and legal pushback from US big tech companies. Yet, paradoxically, the volume and intensity of lobbying and disinformation campaigns also suggest that these very companies start to fear more and more the fact that in the near future, countries in regions like Latin America and Europe that have very limited digital capacity may grow ever more restless about the fact of having become technological colonies. The battle will be hard, but not everything is lost.

Brazil, a country that has in recent years demonstrated its desire — sometimes proudly, sometimes discreetly — to assert its national sovereignty vis-à-vis the interference of the US, and which has pursued a long-term agenda to move closer to the ambitious goal of digital sovereignty, offers us some food for thought about the difficulty of the contemporary technological terrain. Furthermore, it alerts us to the fact that any politician or activist who wants to achieve even limited elements of digital sovereignty needs to prepare for a major communication and legal pushback from US big tech companies. Yet, paradoxically, the volume and intensity of lobbying and disinformation campaigns also suggest that these very companies start to fear more and more the fact that in the near future, countries in regions like Latin America and Europe that have very limited digital capacity may grow ever more restless about the fact of having become technological colonies. The battle will be hard, but not everything is lost.

by Vanessa Oliveira...Vanessa Oliveira is a professor of journalism at Mackenzie Presbyterian University and PUC-SP, and a researcher at the Alameda Institute