Between September 20 and October 2, Instituto Democracia em Xeque identified a disinformation campaign published by figures of the South Korean right in support of Flávio Bolsonaro, with references to “election fraud” in Brazil, which reached 2.6 million views and 724,000 interactions. The data point to an open campaign by leaders of a party and a movement of the South Korean far right carrying the narrative of election fraud in Brazil, amplified by pro-Bolsonaro accounts.
The case began on the afternoon of September 28 (Brasília time). At 5:22 p.m., Kim Jinil (@jinil_official), the representative of the South Korean right-wing Freedom and Innovation Party, published a post about the “Korea-US joint election fraud investigation” with an “international political calendar” (633 likes, 39,000 views). Six hours later, the former prime minister and former acting president of South Korea and leader of the party, Hwang Kyo-ahn (@hkyoahn), published two posts in Korean on X with the hashtags of Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign. The first, at 11:37 p.m., declared that the party “supports candidate Flávio Bolsonaro”, carried a K-pop-style support video and reached 1.05 million views, 20,500 likes and 6,000 retweets. The second, at 11:55 p.m., said that “Korea and Brazil must stand together” and announced remarks on “election fraud”, the defense of freedom and democracy, and international solidarity; it had 228,000 views, 14,900 likes and 3,800 retweets. At 3:54 a.m. on the 29th, lawyer Park Joohyeon (@parkjoohyeon79) wrote that Koreans hope Flávio will “break through the election fraud” and win, tagging @FlavioBolsonaro, @BolsonaroSP and @bolsonaross31; and Park repeated the sentence about fraud, now on behalf of Hwang’s party and also tagging @jairbolsonaro (2,400 likes, 27,300 views).
The repercussion in Brazil came on the morning of the 29th. In the first hours, those who replied to Hwang were South Korean accounts (10 replies and quote posts between midnight and 4 a.m., against 2 from Brazilian accounts), and some tagged the Bolsonaro family and Brazilian profiles: @jongkeun tagged Flávio, Jair, Eduardo and Carlos Bolsonaro at 12:20 a.m., and @ehehzlzl tagged five Brazilian accounts at 4:25 a.m. The first Brazilian amplification with significant reach came from @Byanu, at 5:21 a.m.: “My efforts to introduce Bolsonaro to South Korea have paid off” (4,300 likes); three minutes later, his comment on the K-pop-style clip reached 156,000 views.
At 7:31 a.m., Paulo de Tarso spread the message @paulodetarsog (9,200 likes, 134,000 views), and from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Brazilian accounts made 322 replies and quote posts to the two posts, against 19 from South Korean accounts. They were followed by Allan dos Santos (1:37 p.m., 11,700 likes on X and 420,000 interactions on Instagram), Revista Oeste (5:10 p.m., 11,000 likes) and, on October 1, Eduardo Bolsonaro (12,100 likes), as well as state deputies Gil Diniz, Major Mecca and Capitão Assumção and pages supporting Bolsonaro and Nikolas Ferreira.
September 29 accounts for 143 of the 266 Portuguese-language tweets in the sample and 92% of the 724,000 interactions recorded on the accounts monitored by the Institute. About two-thirds (66%) of the accounts that retweeted Hwang are Brazilian. The fraud accusation gained reach in Portuguese through the translation of Park’s post made by the Korean profile @ehehzlzl, at 11:02 a.m., with 4,800 likes.
The collection gathered 4,365 retweets of the two posts (94% of the 4,656 recorded), made by 3,912 accounts, 857 replies and quote posts, and 2,415 tweets from searches in Korean, Portuguese and English. The collection covers 13 days and was carried out on October 2, with the day still in progress, and X search returns a sample.
Brazilian accounts make up 66% of those that retweeted @hkyoahn’s post and 57% of those that retweeted @parkjoohyeon79’s. On the accounts monitored by the Institute, 50 posts about the South Korean endorsement totaled 724,000 interactions, 58% of them on a single Instagram post by Allan dos Santos. The mention of fraud remained limited: it appears in 22 of the 328 Korean-language tweets about Brazil and in none of the 50 posts from the monitored accounts.
1 It is important to note that this account (@bolsonaross3) is part of an apocryphal network running an unofficial campaign in favor of Flávio Bolsonaro, revealed in a report by the fact-checking agency Aos Fatos. Its mention would suggest some degree of coordination with operators of this network, since a search for accounts associated with Bolsonaro would hardly lead organically to this fake account.
- The authors are leaders of a South Korean right-wing party.
Hwang Kyo-ahn (@hkyoahn) is a former prime minister and former acting president of South Korea and leads the Freedom and Innovation Party (자유와혁신). Park Joohyeon (@parkjoohyeon79) is a lawyer and describes himself in his bio as the Korean head of the “Korea-US joint election fraud investigation team”. Kim Jinil (@jinil_official), the party’s secretary-general, signaled the action six hours before Hwang’s first post (“a dove has flown to Brazil”) and wrote on September 29: “the dove that left for Brazil has arrived at its destination”.
- The content casts doubt on the Brazilian electoral process.
Park wrote at 3:54 a.m. on September 29 that Koreans hope Flávio will “break through the election fraud” (부정선거를 뚫고) and win: 3,190 likes, 818 retweets and 19,500 views. At 12:46 p.m., he repeated the sentence on behalf of Hwang’s party, tagging four Bolsonaro family accounts: 2,448 likes, 626 retweets and 27,300 views. Hwang’s post, from 11:55 p.m. on September 28, Brasília time, announces remarks on “election fraud” and “international solidarity”: 14,873 likes, 3,838 retweets and 228,000 views.
- There are signs of an organized movement.
Of the 340 South Korean accounts that retweeted, 145 (43%) carry “AWEB” or “A-WEB” in their name or bio, an acronym the Korean election-denial movement uses to denounce the world association of election bodies. More than half (52%) were created in 2025 or 2026, after the Yoon Suk-yeol impeachment crisis.
- It was pro-Bolsonaro accounts that brought the topic to the Brazilian public.
The post with the highest engagement is by Allan dos Santos on Instagram, with 420,000 interactions. On X, the most-liked posts in Portuguese are by Eduardo Bolsonaro (12,100), Allan dos Santos (11,700) and Revista Oeste (11,000). The mention of fraud arrived in Portuguese through @ehehzlzl’s translation, with 4,829 likes and 1,122 retweets.
| Indicator | Value |
|---|---|
| @hkyoahn’s support post (Sep 28): views | 1,052,744 |
| @hkyoahn’s post mentioning fraud (Sep 28): views | 227,513 |
| @parkjoohyeon79’s post (Sep 29): views | 19,472 |
| Retweets collected from the two posts analyzed | 4,365 (94% of total) |
| Accounts that retweeted | 3,912 |
| Accounts that retweeted both posts | 453 |
| Replies and quote posts to the two posts | 857 |
| Korean-language tweets about Brazil / authors | 328 / 174 |
| Portuguese-language tweets about the South Korean endorsement / authors | 266 / 226 |
| Posts on accounts monitored by the Institute / interactions | 50 / 724,108 |
Collected on X and from accounts monitored by the Institute, from September 20 to October 2, 2026. Times are in Brasília time. Retweets of @hkyoahn’s support post were not collected; the two posts analyzed are the ones that mention election fraud.
Tweets per day in the search sample, Brasília time
Source: Instituto Democracia em Xeque. X data, Sep 20 to Oct 2, 2026 (Oct 2 partial).
Unique tweets returned by the searches. “In Korean, about Brazil”: text with Korean characters and a mention of Brazil, Bolsonaro, Flávio or Lula. “In Portuguese”: tweets that mention Korea or Hwang together with Flávio, Bolsonaro, election, voting machines or fraud. October 2 is a partial day.
The peak came on September 29, the day after Hwang’s posts: 100 tweets in Korean and 143 in Portuguese. Before that, the sample had 67 Korean-language tweets about Brazil in nine days. The 266 tweets in Portuguese total 95,500 likes and 20,800 retweets; the 328 in Korean, 62,300 likes and 16,200 retweets.
Interactions per day on posts about the South Korean endorsement, accounts monitored by the Institute
Source: Instituto Democracia em Xeque. Instagram, X, TikTok and Facebook data, Sep 20 to Oct 2, 2026.
Posts from accounts monitored by the Institute that mention Hwang, the Freedom and Innovation Party or South Korea together with Flávio or Bolsonaro. Retweets are excluded (47 records), because they carry the interactions of the original post. Collab posts, which appear on more than one account, are counted once (10 duplicates removed).
On the monitored accounts, 50 posts from 39 accounts totaled 724,000 interactions. Instagram accounts for 619,000 (85%), in 22 posts. September 29 concentrates 664,000 interactions, 92% of the total. The distribution is uneven: the median is 946 interactions per post, and Allan dos Santos’s post has 420,000. Among legislators, Capitão Assumção, Eduardo Bolsonaro, Gil Diniz and Major Mecca posted about the topic.
Account origin, estimated from profile name, bio and location
763 accounts
3,602 accounts
Source: Instituto Democracia em Xeque. X data, collected on Oct 2, 2026.
Origin is an estimate: “South Korean” when the name, bio or location has Korean characters or the Korean flag; “Brazilian” when they have the Brazilian flag, terms such as Brasil, Bolsonaro and patriota, Brazilian state abbreviations or Portuguese accented characters.
Brazilian accounts are 66% of the 3,602 that retweeted @hkyoahn and 57% of the 763 that retweeted @parkjoohyeon79; South Korean accounts are 8% and 17%. A total of 453 accounts retweeted both posts. Among the 340 South Korean accounts, the median is 314 followers, and 34% were created in 2025, the year of the Yoon Suk-yeol impeachment crisis. The retweets-per-view rate of the Korean-language tweets (median of 1.4%, across 137 tweets) is below that of the tweets with Flávio’s hashtag (2.5%, across 496), which does not indicate amplification outside the usual pattern.
Mentions, replies and quote posts among 947 accounts on X
Source: Instituto Democracia em Xeque. X data, Sep 20 to Oct 2, 2026. Position = network structure.
Each dot is an account; each line is a reply, quote post or mention in the 1,413 tweets on the topic. Dot size indicates how many accounts interacted with the profile. The figure shows the largest connected component (947 of the 1,053 accounts). In a reply, the @handles that X repeats from the post being replied to do not count as mentions; platform accounts, such as @YouTube and @grok, are excluded.
The network has 1,368 interactions among 1,053 accounts: 830 replies, 335 quote posts and 203 mentions. The structure is a star around the original posts: 696 accounts interacted with @hkyoahn, 475 of them Brazilian (68%), and 128 with @parkjoohyeon79, 83 of them Brazilian. Most of the connection originates in Brazil: of the 571 Brazilian accounts that posted, 526 (92%) addressed a South Korean account. In the opposite direction, 38 of the 112 South Korean accounts addressed Brazilian accounts, mainly @Byanu (10 accounts), @BolsonaroSP (5) and @TanoueNicole (5); 6 of them tagged Brazilian profiles on their own initiative, such as @FlavioBolsonaro and @BolsonaroSP.
There is no dense core of Korean and Brazilian accounts interacting with each other: the Korean side sought out the pro-Bolsonaro profiles, but the volume came from Brazilian accounts replying to the original posts. This indicates an operation strategically organized to resonate on Brazilian soil, endorsing a discourse of international authority about a false risk to Brazil’s electoral integrity.
The fraud narrative circulated mainly in Korean. In Brazil, the episode was presented as international support for Flávio Bolsonaro and as international allegations about the electoral system.
The mention of fraud is in the original posts. Hwang wrote that “Korea and Brazil must stand together” and that he would speak about “election fraud, the task of defending freedom and democracy, and international solidarity”. Park wrote that Koreans wish for Flávio to “break through the election fraud and become president of Brazil” and repeated the sentence hours later. Quoting Hwang’s post, Park added: “Korea-US-Brazil global freedom alliance! Let us root out election fraud together!”.
Among the 328 Korean-language tweets about Brazil, 22 use election fraud terms, from 17 authors. The acronym A-WEB, present in the profile of 43% of the South Korean accounts that retweeted, stands for South Korea’s Association of World Election Bodies.
Founded in 2013 in Incheon, A-WEB is an international organization devoted to technical exchange among electoral authorities around the world. However, far-right channels and digital influencers in South Korea began to label the association as the “epicenter” of a global cyber plot to manipulate results.
The tags “Yoon Again”, “Stop the Steal” and “CCP out” are also common in the profiles.
Korean accounts describe the two countries as identical cases: a president “elected by fraud” and a right-wing leader imprisoned for denouncing it. The account @rainbow241207 wrote on October 2 that “the truly elected one, President Yoon Suk-yeol, is under arrest”2, while Lee Jae-myung, “elected by fraud”, governs. Meanwhile, @luckypark528 called Lula and the current president of South Korea, Lee Jae-myung, presidents “elected by fraud” on September 29.
2 This comparison had already been made in earlier episodes, such as in May 2025, because of his confrontational tactics.
On October 1, the account @gwigiul860721 posted in Korean that Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE) had refused to accredit 14 right-wing organizations from Spain, Portugal and Argentina as observers, and that “only the observers close to those who raise suspicions about electronic voting were barred”. The same post notes that the OAS, the European Union and the Carter Center were accredited. @iloveholykorea replied to a Brazilian account: “I pray that the whole truth of the election fraud comes to light”. The reach was marginal: the posts have up to 4 likes and fewer than 100 views. This report did not verify the information about the accreditation.
Brazilian accounts presented the episode as an external endorsement and an affinity of values. Eduardo Bolsonaro (@BolsonaroSP) quoted Hwang on October 1: “Religious freedom, democracy, family, respect for life, freedom of expression are values we share”. Allan dos Santos wrote on September 29: “The good ones united! South Korean politician supporting @FlavioBolsonaro”. State deputy Gil Diniz highlighted the K-pop-style clip made with artificial intelligence: “this kind of content breaks out of the bubble”.
In retweets, accounts shared the election fraud claim, such as the translation of Park’s post published by @ehehzlzl, a Korean profile that writes in Portuguese: “overcome a possible election fraud”, with 4,829 likes, 1,122 retweets and 36,400 views. The others total 220 likes. The sample has 18 profiles with Korean identification that post in Portuguese or English, among them @iloveholykorea, @ViiV_333 and @forthefreedom25, the party’s official account.
- @jinil_official, Sep 28, 5:22 p.m. “To everyone waiting for the investigation of fraudulent elections in the US-South Korea alliance, this is content you should check carefully”. https://x.com/jinil_official/status/2104668011601047833
- @hkyoahn, Sep 28, 11:37 p.m. Statement of support for Flávio Bolsonaro. https://x.com/hkyoahn/status/2104762540031140005
- @hkyoahn, Sep 28, 11:55 p.m. Remarks on “election fraud” and international solidarity. https://x.com/hkyoahn/status/2104767007866728581
- @jongkeun, Sep 29, 12:20 a.m. Reply to Hwang tagging the Bolsonaro family. https://x.com/jongkeun/status/2104773175292973557
- @parkjoohyeon79, Sep 29, 3:54 a.m. “break through the election fraud”. https://x.com/parkjoohyeon79/status/2104827029325840529
- @ehehzlzl, Sep 29, 4:25 a.m. Reply to Hwang tagging Brazilian accounts. https://x.com/ehehzlzl/status/2104835007034605845
- @Byanu, Sep 29, 5:21 a.m. “My efforts to introduce Bolsonaro to South Korea have paid off”. https://x.com/Byanu/status/2104849061987713356
- @Byanu, Sep 29, 5:24 a.m. Comment on the K-pop-style clip. https://x.com/Byanu/status/2104849831076274524
- @paulodetarsog, Sep 29, 7:31 a.m. Comment on the K-pop-style clip. https://x.com/paulodetarsog/status/2104881703890100470
- @ehehzlzl, Sep 29, 11:02 a.m. Translation of Park’s post into Portuguese. https://x.com/ehehzlzl/status/2104934782094467334
- @jinil_official, Sep 29, 12:45 p.m. “the dove that left for Brazil has arrived at its destination”. https://x.com/jinil_official/status/2104960649990373640
- @parkjoohyeon79, Sep 29, 12:46 p.m. Party support and “break through the election fraud”, with the Bolsonaro family accounts tagged. https://x.com/parkjoohyeon79/status/2104960976919605393
- @parkjoohyeon79, Sep 29, 12:47 p.m. “Korea-US-Brazil global freedom alliance”. https://x.com/parkjoohyeon79/status/2104961370760560920
- @allanconta5, Sep 29, 1:37 p.m. “The good ones united!”. https://x.com/allanconta5/status/2104973842154135712
- @revistaoeste, Sep 29, 5:10 p.m. News story about the endorsement. https://x.com/revistaoeste/status/2105027337444008285
- @luckypark528, Sep 29, 8:46 p.m. Lula and Lee Jae-myung “elected by fraud”. https://x.com/luckypark528/status/2105081917792276568
- Allan dos Santos, Sep 29. Post with the highest engagement (Instagram). https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd4NmA1yWVP
- Gil Diniz, Sep 29. K-pop-style clip (Instagram). https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd4sR3_oavX
- @iloveholykorea, Oct 1, 11:24 a.m. “that the whole truth of the election fraud comes to light”. https://x.com/iloveholykorea/status/2105665229262930156
- @gwigiul860721, Oct 1, 11:36 a.m. TSE and international observers. https://x.com/gwigiul860721/status/2105668242941612423
- @BolsonaroSP, Oct 1, 4:03 p.m. Hwang’s message of support. https://x.com/BolsonaroSP/status/2105735427621884016
- @rainbow241207, Oct 2, 12:54 a.m. Yoon “under arrest”, Lee Jae-myung “elected by fraud”. https://x.com/rainbow241207/status/2105868956871676393
Source and period. Collection on X carried out on October 2, 2026, with searches going back to September 20: nine queries in Korean, Portuguese and English, plus the retweeters, replies and quote posts of the posts by @hkyoahn and @parkjoohyeon79. From the Institute’s databases came the posts by monitored accounts on Instagram, X, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube that mention Korea.
Coverage. X search returns a sample, not the full universe; 9 of the 2,415 tweets predate the period and were left out of the time series. The retweeters collected are 94% of the retweets recorded. The collection spans 13 days and, outside the Institute’s databases, covers only X.
Account origin. The classification between South Korean and Brazilian is heuristic, based on name, bio and location; 27% of the accounts remained unidentified.
Interaction network. The edges come from replies, quote posts and mentions in the tweets on the topic; retweets are not included, because the retweeter collection covers only the two original posts and would form two stars. Account origin uses the same heuristic, and 26% of them remained unidentified.
Institute databases. The query for Korea-related terms returned 432 posts; 107 deal with the South Korean endorsement and, after removing retweets and collab duplicates, 50 remain. The text was extracted with 220 characters, which limits term searches at the end of long captions.
South Korean right and Bolsonaro supporters amplify election fraud narrative
October 2, 2026
HOW TO CITE THIS DOCUMENT:
South Korean right and Bolsonaro supporters amplify election fraud narrative. Instituto Democracia em Xeque, October 2, 2026. Available at: <https://institutodx.org/eleições2026>
Report team
Marcelo Alves
Graphic design: Moara Juliana
Contact: [email protected]
