How an extremist network articulated a hoax linking Brazil’s President Lula to child abuse on X

Monitoring of 1,819 posts showed far-right users tried to manipulate Grok, X’s AI tool

Originally published on Global Voices

This article was originally published on the fact-checking agency Aos Fatos website, on September 30, 2026. It is part of the joint initiative Laboratório de Investigação Eleitoral (Investigative Electoral Lab) with Agência Pública, Amado Mundo and Núcleo Jornalismo. An edited version is republished here under a partnership agreement between Global Voices and Pública.

A few days before the first round of the 2026 general elections in Brazil on October 4, it took only a few hours for a line said by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva about preventive exams for prostate cancer to be twisted into a pedophilia accusation against him. Aos Fatos obtained and checked 1,819 posts on X (formerly Twitter), which reconstructed how this hoax was planted and harvested by Bolsonarista users on social media between September 28 and 29.

The distortion in the meaning of Lula’s speech stemmed from a false pedophilia accusation that had already been boosted hours ahead of a statement he made at a campaign event in the city of Belém, Pará state, on September 28. Users manipulated questions asked to Grok, X’s AI assistance tool, to make it state “Lula consumes CP” — an acronym in English for child pornography.

The chatbot warned that the sentence was wordplay and that it had no records to support the claim. However, the edit cut from Lula’s speech, shared on social media, gave the narrative new momentum.

Besides requests to make the video viral and to mobilize influencers, some publications also revived old episodes and characters without any connection to Lula’s line to back theories associating the president with child abuse.

During his rally, Lula was talking about the importance of cancer prevention and criticizing men’s resistance to having prostate exams, compared to women’s healthcare culture, which, according to him, is used to having gynecological exams from an early age.

The beginning

Among the publications with broader reach identified by the survey, one of the first to cut a quote from Lula’s speech was posted at 11.59 p.m. on September 28 by Pâm, an influencer, founder of a Bolsonarista site called The Incorrupt, and member of Estúdio 5, a pro-Bolsonaro content-making hub aligned with Catholicism.

At 12.28 a.m. on September 29, the Space Liberdade account published another cut from the same quote. It took only a minute for the interpretation to be turned into an explicit accusation. At 12.29 a.m., two other posts were already calling the president “a pedophile”; one of them requesting users to pass this claim along.

In the following hours, several users started acting to amplify the reach of the accusation. Posts asked people to download and repost the video, suggested boosting the hashtag #LULAPEDOPHILE, and included messages like “it has to go viral.” At 2.48 a.m., a profile proposed to pick out two sentences from Lula’s speech, create a hashtag, and mobilize 10 to 20 influencers around it.

Five hours before Pâm’s publication, users connected to the so-called “bolha da resenha” (hangout banter bubble) were already experimenting with Grok, forcing the tool to associate Lula with pedophilia. The term describes an ecosystem of profiles, most of them anonymous, that combine aggressive humour, extremist political content, and reproducing chans aesthetics — anonymous forums well known as one of the main cradles of the current far-right.

One of the first users started with the words “cerveja e picanha” (beer and filet steak) and asked the tool to summarize the expression with its initials in two letters, manipulating it to write “Lula consumes CP” (child pornography). After that, other profiles set new instructions and made the chatbot create similar sentences.

The stories crossed paths overnight. At 3.39 a.m., a user shared a cut with the line about “touch” and asked Grok if Lula was “addicted to CP.” At 4.10 a.m., another one reloaded the association in a comment on Space Liberdade’s post.

The survey also found references to codes like “Jack” and “CPzeiro,” besides slogans such as “PROTECT OUR CHILDREN” and “LULA DON’T TOUCH OUR CHILDREN.” Overall, 43 percent of the posts analyzed (746) had straightforward pedophilia accusations or, besides accusing Lula, encouraged the propagation of this assumption.

The narrative was already formed by the time it reached profiles with major political prominence. At 9.49 a.m. on September 29, Nikolas Ferreira, a die-hard Jair Bolsonaro ally and member of the Chamber of Deputies, published one of the cuts. At 10.23 a.m., he shared a video playing Lula’s quote and saying: “A little girl doesn’t learn to be touched in any way, Lula!!!”

Ferreira had been linked to the “hangout banter bubble” before.

In September 2025, after the killing of conservative US activist Charlie Kirk, members of the group celebrated Ferreira’s posts saying he had “joined the hangout.” At the time, the politician published a version of the Pepe the Frog meme, a channer mascot, featuring his own image and saying “Be the far-right that they fear.”

The survey doesn’t indicate that the Congressman had taken part in these recent experiments with Grok or in creating the accusation against Lula. Yet he shows up among the first politicians with a wider reach to boost the narrative, hours after it started circulating.

A while after Ferreira’s posts, expressions associated with this narrative were among X’s trending topics. “PROTECT THE CHILDREN,” which was ranked 28th at 9.04 a.m., jumped to the first spot by 11.15 a.m. At the same time, “LULA DON’T TOUCH THE CHILDREN” was in fourth, and “pedophile” in 20th.

On September 30, the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) gave Nikolas Ferreira a 24-hour deadline to remove his post on X. Minister Estela Aranha argued that he had attributed an “entirely different connotation” to the original quote, taking it out of the public health context and associating it with crimes.

From misinformation to conspiracy

After it went viral, the hoax no longer relied on what was said in Belém. Social media accounts started to revive episodes and characters without any connection to it to introduce Lula as a member of an alleged pedophile network or ring.

These theories also reached Telegram and WhatsApp groups monitored by Aos Fatos. Besides claiming Lula had defended or “trivialized” pedophilia in his speech, messages started to talk about a “likely inclination to pedophilia” and to introduce isolated episodes as an indication of such behaviour.

One of the allegations exploited the fact that the speech took place in the state of Pará, where several cases of sexual violence against children had allegedly occurred in the local Marajó archipelago. “A geographical and discursive coincidence that should, at least, cause embarrassment rather than applause,” read one of the messages.

There is no evidence linking Lula to such crimes registered in the region. Sexual violence against children and teens is a real and documented problem, but it has also been a target of false and unsubstantiated allegations for years. Some of the posts included statements made in 2022 by Senator Damares Alves, then minister of women, family, and human rights in Bolsonaro’s cabinet, saying she had been attacked for denouncing abuses in Marajó Island.

At the time, Alves said she had received testimonies about children who had had their teeth removed to facilitate oral sex and were forced to ingest pasty food to facilitate anal sex.

The allegations weren’t registered by any investigative bodies, and the Federal Prosecution Office (MPF) presented a public civil action against Alves for spreading what they classified as “sensationalist false information involving sexual abuse and torture to the children of Marajó.”

Some posts also started to associate Lula with Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced US financier accused of leading a network of sexual exploitation involving minors. What was used as evidence for that was an email attributed to Epstein in which he claims to have talked to Lula on the phone, during the time Lula was imprisoned in Curitiba, Brazil, through Noam Chomsky.

The email exists, but it doesn’t prove whether the conversation ever occurred. Valeria Chomsky, Noam’s wife, denied he had mediated it. When the email was first publicized, the Social Communications Office of the Presidency said that “the referred phone call never happened.” This kind of phone call would also be incompatible with the rules of the Federal Police prison ward where Lula was held, according to experts interviewed by Folha de S. Paulo newspaper.

Other Brazilian politicians were also mentioned by Epstein, including former president Jair Bolsonaro, whom the financier referred to once as “the man.”