A Brazilian fact-checking group, Project Eleições Sem Fake, found in a study of 347 public WhatsApp chat groups that almost all of the political images shared in the groups from August to October were false or misleading.

“From a sample of more than 100,000 political images that circulated in those 347 groups, we selected the 50 most widely shared,” the researchers wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times this week. “Eight of those 50 photos and images were considered completely false; 16 were real pictures but used out of their original context or related to distorted data; four were unsubstantiated claims, not based on a trustworthy public source. This means that 56 percent of the most-shared images were misleading. Only eight percent of the 50 most widely shared images were considered fully truthful.”

The group called on Whatsapp to restrict the number of people a single user can broadcast a message to, as well as the number of times a message can be forwarded, in an effort to mitigate the power of the fake news campaign.

The news of the business-led election-meddling follows reports that in August, Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of the pro-torture, openly misogynist candidate, met with former Trump administration strategist Steve Bannon, who offered “internet tips, analysis, interpreting data, that type of stuff”—raising concerns that Bannon has brought his quest to help right-wing autocrats take control of the world’s democracies to Brazil.

Haddad’s campaign has attempted to counter the pro-Bolsonaro fake news campaign by drawing attention to his opponent’s relationship with Bannon, whose appointment to President Donald Trump’s White House was applauded by white supremacists.

“Steve Bannon is accused of sabotaging democratic regimes around the world. He uses fake news to spread fear and violence to win elections,” the narrator in a new ad by Haddad tells viewers. “Bannon is a specialist in spreading terror around the world. Bolsonaro has spent the last 30 years doing this in Brazil.”

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