Racially biased disinformation as structural violence: A discursive operations framework from Brazil

On March 14, 2018, Marielle Franco, a Black, queer city councilwoman from Rio de Janeiro, was assassinated. Within hours, false claims that she was “married to a drug trafficker” began circulating; formally debunked, they recirculated two years later. The case exemplifies a structural pattern: in Brazil, disinformation targeting Black individuals who die amid State violence consistently substitutes identities, fabricates criminal histories, and defames private lives to retroactively legitimize racial violence. Analyzing 3,674 fact checks from two IFCN-certified Brazilian agencies (2018–2023), this article proposes a replicable five-operation discursive framework for understanding how racially biased disinformation operates and compounds its harm.