Formed in 2018 at the Palácio do Planalto and coordinated by Jair and his son Carlos Bolsonaro, the group managed the former President, Jair Bolsonaro’s, social media and flooded online platforms with fake accounts.
The Bolsonaro family has repeatedly denied the existence of the Office of Hate. In 2019, former allies Congresswoman Joice Hasselman, Alexandre Frota, Heitor Freire, and Brazilian reporters confirmed that it was used against opposition members. One such use case of the Gabinete do Ódio was to spread the rumour that PT’s Fernando Haddad was promoting homosexuality in public schools through a “gay kit,” when in reality he was proposing to introduce anti-homophobia materials.
In April 2021, the Federal senate launched COVID-19 CPI, a parliamentary inquiry on Bolsonaro’s handling of the pandemic. They identified 15 people, including Bolsonaro, involved with the Office of Hate who downplayed the effects of the virus. In March 2020, Bolsonaro called COVID-19 a “little flu” and that “many of the media spread a feeling of fear by exploiting the many victims in Italy, a country with a lot of elderly people and whose climate is totally different from ours.”
In November 2021, members of the Office of Hate travelled to Dubai and met with spyware and cybersecurity firm DarkMatter Group representatives, discussing the 2022 presidential election.
