Meat company accused of Google campaign against anti-slavery activist

The largest meat-processing company in the world, JBS, has denied being behind a Google campaign attacking Brazil’s leading campaigner against slave labour. The Brazilian newspaper, Folha de São Paulo, has published an article arguing that JBS and digital marketing firm 4Buzz led the campaign against Leonardo Sakamoto. JBS has previously been accused of violating workers’ rights and of contributing to deforestation. A spokesperson for Google said that the company was “not responsible for, and cannot interfere with content published by advertisers on AdWords”, adding that ads that broke the company’s policies could be removed.

JBS, the world’s largest meat-processing company, has denied organising a Google advertising campaign to attack Brazil’s most prominent anti-slave labour campaigner.

Leonardo Sakamoto, the president of the NGO Repórter Brasil, has repeatedly been the target of physical and legal threats over his journalism and activism in support of workers’ rights.

In 2015, search results for his name and his blog were listed under an advertisement stating: “Leonardo Sakamoto Lies.”

An article published in Friday’s O Folha de São Paulo claims that JBS, and a digital marketing agency called 4Buzz, were behind the campaign.

A lawyer representing Sakamoto filed a request to a civil court in São Paulo for Google to release information about who ordered the advert. Google cited JBS’s name, address and phone number in its response to the court order, as well as a number of IP addresses. But it declined to state who paid for the advert, citing client confidentiality.

A separate judicial request to supply the identity of the IP addresses revealed that the majority of them were linked to 4Buzz, a digital marketing agency contracted by the meat company in 2015.

JBS and 4Buzz did not respond to repeated requests for comment from the Guardian. In response to a comment posted on the JBS Facebook wall on Friday, however, the company said it “denies promoting any kind of action with the goal of defaming or attacking the journalist Leonardo Sakamoto”. It was seeking to “clarify the incident”, it added.

A Google spokesperson said the company was “not responsible for, and cannot interfere with content published by advertisers on AdWords”, but added that violation of its policies could result in removal of an ad.

The phrase “Leonardo Sakamoto Lies” linked to an article by a blogger which claimed the activist received R$1m (US$276,000) from the Workers party to attack the opposition.

According to the text, Repórter Brasil took the money “to kiss Dilma [Rousseff]’s ass” and the NGO “did not carry out any physical activity” but “burnt through over R$1m a year from the ministry of human rights”.

Since its foundation by Sakamoto in 2001, the NGO has become the country’s leading source of information about slave labour and workers’ rights violations.

In fact, Repórter Brasil received around R$499,000 (US$138,000) from the Secretariat of Human Rights over a three-year period, with most of the money coming from the International Labour Organisation and other international agencies.

Until 2014, its website published a so-called “dirty list” of Brazilian companies that had been fined by the labour ministry for using slave labour. When a court order blocked the government’s publication of the list, Repórter Brasil devised its own “Transparency List” to ensure guilty companies remain in the spotlight.

JBS has been repeatedly cited in Repórter Brasil articles for workers’ rights violations. In March 2015, it reported that JBS bought cattle from a family accused by federal police of being the “worst Amazon deforesters of all time”. In 2014, it reported that the company had been fined R$2.3m for serving its employees maggot-infested meat.

Sakamoto’s work has resulted in defamation and death threats. Earlier this year, a Brazilian newspaper published an entirely fabricated story along with a picture of Sakamoto’s face, claiming he had said “the retired are useless to society”, prompting a cascade of violent abuse.

He is also facing criminal charges – and possible jail time – for divulging the name of a company prosecuted for using workers in slave-like conditions.

Despite Sakamoto being a longstanding critic of the government, his critics have accused him of being in the pay of the Workers party, as Brazil’s political polarization has deepened.

“I have been working on the issue of slave labour for 17 years, and I have always been abused and threatened,” he said, referring to threats made both over social media and in person. “But as the political temperature has risen over the past few years, all of my activities are being used as part of this battle.”

“If you support workers’ rights, you’re a leftist, you’re a communist, you’re a petista [the name for supporters of the Workers party]. And that means you must be corrupt.”

The article was hosted on the site FolhaPolítica.org, which has no connection to the Folha Group, one of Brazil’s major publishing houses, but which mixes mainstream articles that are highly critical of the governing Workers party with outright fabrications.

Attempts to contact FolhaPolítica.org received no response, although Renan Santos, a senior member of the Movimento Brasil Livre – a libertarian organisation lobbying for Rousseff’s impeachment – confirmed that its chief spokesman, Kim Kataguiri, previously worked there.

In an article posted on Friday on the Oxford University Politics Blog, João Carlos Magalhães, a former journalist at O Folha de São Paulo and now a PhD researcher at the London School of Economics, argues that digital media platforms have played a much more significant role in fomenting Brazil’s current political crisis than the mainstream media has.

“The feeling of possessing an unaccountable power is one of the reasons why social media is so loved,” he wrote. “What events such as the Brazilian crisis – or, for that matter, the ascension of Donald Trump – demonstrate is that freedom of expression is a personal right with serious collective consequences.”

For Sakamoto, the campaign against him shows the need for Brazilian society to reflect on the role that journalists play.

“Journalists need to be protected for the good of democracy, and for the good of the country,” he said.