Two students behind Sleeping Giants Brazil, who fought misinformation in Brazil, confronted online threats and a lawsuit against Twitter aimed at unmasking them
David Biller / Associated Press : Tweets: @dlbiller , @slpng_giants , and @ap Tweets: David Biller / @dlbiller : Brazil was flooded with misinformation about the coronavirus this year, and two students fought it. Fearing legal action or worse, they've left their city behind and are revealing their identities. This is a story about them, and about Brazil in 2020. https://apnews.com/... @slpng_giants : OUTRAGEOUS. It appears that @twitter, following a court case in Brazil, is going to give up the data that identifies the founders of Sleeping Giants Brazil. In response, they have had tounmask themselves, putting themselves in danger. That @jack would agree to this is chilling https://twitter.com/... @ap : Two law students created a Twitter account to call out Brazilian websites for spreading “hate speech and Fake News.” Vitriol poured in. Believing their names would soon be revealed, they decided to leave their city and reveal their identities to AP. https://apne.ws/5nUGIrw
Context & Ripple Effects
Sleeping Giants Brazil was the local arm of a tactic the Washington Post had already declared durable in 2018: coordinated social media pressure against advertisers and platforms that amplifies bad actors. The Brazilian students applied it to coronavirus misinformation, calling out websites by name — and drew online threats and a lawsuit aimed at piercing their anonymity in response.
Their unmasking fits a broader Brazilian pattern: when the government blacked out official COVID-19 figures that summer, volunteer developers stepped in to keep the data public, and two years later the same misinformation fight escalated into a judicial experiment with sweeping content-removal powers. This story is the human cost at the grassroots end of that arc.
First-order effects
- Twitter, ordered by a Brazilian court, hands over the data identifying the two founders — platform compliance with a local court overrides the anonymity their campaign depended on.
- The founders, fearing legal action or worse, leave their city and voluntarily reveal their identities to the Associated Press rather than wait to be unmasked.
Second-order effects
- Volunteer misinformation watchdogs in Brazil face a chilling effect: the same court pathway that reached Sleeping Giants Brazil is available against any anonymous account calling out fake news.
- Advertiser-pressure campaigns like Sleeping Giants must weigh operating openly or through intermediaries, since platforms have demonstrated they will surrender founder identities under legal compulsion.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward Brazil's escalating state role in content disputes — the trajectory that later gave a single justice broad power to order removals and ended in the ban on X — with anonymous civil-society moderators squeezed between platform compliance and state power.
The trend: Brazil's misinformation fight is shifting from anonymous grassroots pressure campaigns to judicially enforced platform disclosures, raising the personal cost of volunteer moderation.