2024 will bring more voters to the polls than ever in history, with elections planned in at least 64 countries, many of them in key global south countries with fragile information ecosystems. Technolo...
Patricia Campos Mello
Patrícia Campos Mello is an editor-at-large and columnist at Folha de São Paulo, the largest newspaper in Brazil. For over 25 years, she has been covering international relations, technology, and politics, and has reported from over 60 countries. She was awarded the Columbia University Maria Moors Cabot award, the International Press Freedom Award of the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Vladimir Herzog Special Award for Democracy and Justice, the International Committee of the Red Cross Prize for humanitarian journalism, and the King of Spain Journalism Prize.
She has been covering influence operations and tech regulation in Brazil, India and the US since 2014. Her investigative reporting led to changes in the electoral law in Brazil. She was Washington correspondent for the Estado de S. Paulo newspaper between 2006 and 2010. She covered the 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020 US elections, and the 9/11 attacks in New York in 2001. She covered the 2014, 2019 and 2024 elections in India.
Patrícia has a degree in Journalism from the University of São Paulo and a Master’s from New York University. She was an associate researcher at Columbia University in 2021/2022, working on a project about internet regulation and electoral disinformation. In the last few years, she spent time in Ukraine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Turkey, Afghanistan and Kenya reporting on conflict and refugees. In 2024, she covered the fall of Assad in Syria and the war in Lebanon. She was the only Brazilian reporter to cover the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone, in 2014 and 2015.
She is the author of Lua de Mel em Kobane, a book about Syrian refugees who resisted the Islamic State siege in Kobane, and Máquina do Ódio, about influence operations and freedom of the press.
Disarming disinformation: how leading international editors are responding to information pollution in a pivotal year for democracy
This panel presents the first insights from the new global research project Disarming Disinformation, which has seen researchers embedded in multiple international newsrooms to study their responses t...
Freedom of the press is considered a fundamental pillar of successful democracies, yet trust in independent media is being eroded by the nefarious application of political power to manipulate public o...
Australia’s path-breaking 2021 legislation, which got Google and Meta to pay more than 300 million dollars to media outlets, is being watched by countries around the world that want to emulate it. H...
The 2022 Brazilian elections worked as a battlefield for the new type of war against democracy: the use of coordinated, highly-funded and state-supported networks of misinformation to win and then sub...
Online violence against women journalists: a global scourge that demands urgent action
Women journalists are increasingly the targets of online violence connected to orchestrated disinformation campaigns waged by states, political actors, conspiracy networks and misogynists. They have b...
As threats to independent journalism continue to accelerate, with efforts to control the free flow of accurate, unbiased information around the world, the law is being weaponised to compromise journal...
Bolsonaro's administration built a disinformation machine known as the “Hate cabinet" run by his sons and advisers to spread fake news and attack journalists, politicians, artists and media outlets ...
Overcoming the trolls: political polarization, disinformation and journalist targets
In 2019, Brazilian political journalist Patricia Campos Mello, who had previously reported from hot spots and conflict zones around the world, hired her first ever bodyguard in the wake of a relentles...
Last year, Brazilian political journalist Patricia Campos Mello, who had previously reported from hot spots and conflict zones around the world, hired her first ever bodyguard in the wake of a relentl...
Jair Bolsonaro's presidency in Brazil has seen escalating attacks on journalists in person and on freedom of information more generally. Threats, intimidation, defamation campaigns, lawsuits - often b...
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