COMBATING DISINFORMATION IN THE BRAZILIAN ELECTORAL PROCESS: AN ANALYSIS OF THE PERFORMANCE OF THE ELECTORAL JUSTICE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE MEDIATION OF INFORMATION
democracy; disinformation; electoral process; information management.
For the electoral process to develop in a transparent, safe and effective way, some pillars of democracy need to be preserved, such as freedom of expression, conceived as a fundamental right, which guarantees citizens the free expression of thought. With the advent of the electronic ballot box, there was a significant increase in the security of the electoral process, compared to the previous model. On the other hand, in the context of elections, there is also a significant increase in false, biased, imprecise information, popularly known as Fake News, putting into question not only technological advances in the field of electoral justice, but also Brazilian democracy. As for the objective, the research will be exploratory in nature, as the intention here will be to explore the problem of disinformation in the electoral process for a better understanding, as well as serving as a subsidy for future investigations. With a view to dialoguing on this theme, the research in focus has as general objective "to map practices to combat disinformation in the Electoral Court, pointing out, from the perspective of information and knowledge management, procedures to be adopted by the Regional Electoral Court of Rio Grande do Norte, to make its actions more efficient in combating disinformation.” As methodological procedures, the research is characterized in terms of the approach to the problem, as a qualitative study, since the analysis of the theme of disinformation in the electoral process will seek the essence of its phenomenon, investigating its nature and scope, and not restricted to mere counting or description. Bibliographic and documentary research will be used to build the theoretical framework, and data collection on the TREs websites, to analyze documents from different electoral justice bodies, as well as foreign organizations. As data collection instruments, questionnaires with open and closed questions will be developed with the civil servants of TRE/RN and voters of the state of Rio Grande do Norte.