The Mob That Came for Three Branches
Supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro, mobilized in part by online falsehoods about Brazil's 2022 vote, stormed the country's Congress, presidential palace and Supreme Court on Jan. 8, 2023. In September 2025, a Supreme Court panel convicted Bolsonaro of a coup plot and sentenced him to more than 27 years.
On Jan. 8, 2023, a week after President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office, thousands of supporters of the man he had defeated broke into three seats of power in Brasília at once. Rioters ransacked the National Congress, the presidential palace and the Supreme Federal Court. “Less than four hours after the storming,” PBS News reported, “security forces were shown on television backing protesters away.”
The rioters were supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro who refused to accept his narrow loss to Lula in the October 2022 election. For months, protesters had camped outside army barracks and called on the military to intervene. Bolsonaro, PBS reported, had “sown doubt about the reliability of the nation's electronic voting system — without any evidence.”
Falsehoods that traveled first
Long before the crowd reached the capital, false claims about Brazil's electronic voting system circulated online. “Political analysts have warned for months that a similar storming was a possibility in Brazil,” PBS News reported, given that Bolsonaro had sown doubt about the reliability of the nation's electronic voting system.
Researchers who have documented the day describe an online mobilization. Social media platforms “did not moderate misleading claims about the election,” and Bolsonaro supporters “used social media to spread misinformation about supposed electoral fraud, further motivating the protesters,” according to a review of the events compiled by researchers cited by Wikipedia. Organizers used encrypted messaging apps, spreading calls to action through WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook groups.
A verdict, more than two years later
On Sept. 11, 2025, a panel of Brazil's Supreme Court convicted Bolsonaro of leading a plot to overturn the 2022 election and remain in power. Four of the five justices found him guilty on five counts, including attempting a coup and membership in an armed criminal organization, and sentenced him to 27 years and three months in prison, according to the Associated Press.
Justice Cármen Lúcia, in her vote to convict, said Bolsonaro was “the instigator, the leader of an organization that orchestrated every possible move to maintain or seize power,” the Associated Press reported. One justice, Luiz Fux, dissented, arguing that “no one can be punished for cogitation.”
Why the case is being watched
Prosecutors said the plot included plans to kill Lula and Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who oversaw the case, according to NPR. The ruling turned a day of physical violence into a legal reckoning that traced the assault back through the online falsehoods that helped summon the crowd.
The Brasília case has drawn comparison to other episodes in which disinformation about an election preceded an attack on the institutions meant to certify it. Human-rights bodies and researchers who study platform accountability continue to cite such sequences as they press governments and companies to act before, not after, a mob assembles.