Datafolha

Controversies

Anti-government protests of 2016

March 13, 2016, during the anti-government protests of 2016, Datafolha counted 500 thousand people demonstrating on Paulista Avenue, in São Paulo, using an on-the-ground sampling methodology adopted since 2011 to estimate the size of mobile crowds in events such as the gay pride parade and the protests that occurred starting in 2013.

The organizers of the protests routinely expressed their displeasure with Datafolha's numbers, considering them an under-estimation. At the invitation of the organizers, a survey by the Israeli company StoreSmarts claimed to have counted 1.48 million people in the protest, by counting the IP addresses of smartphones detected in the region.

Impeachment of Dilma Rousseff

July 16, 2016, Grupo Folha's newspaper Folha de S. Paulo published the headline "For 50% of Brazilians, Temer must stay; 32% asked for the return of Dilma," based on a study conducted by Datafolha two days previously.

Days later, the journalist Glenn Greenwald accused Folha de S. Paulo of "journalistic fraud". Writing for the online newspaper The Intercept, he suggested that it is "simply inconceivable" that in just three months the portion of Brazilians in favor of calling new elections had fallen from 60% to 3%, and that those that wanted the continuation of Michel Temer's government "skyrocketed" from only 8% to 50%. He argued that in the context of a question in the same poll showing only 14% approval of Temer's government, it's "extremely difficult to understand how [the claim] could possibly be true."

Greenwald went on to say that based on the full data and underlying questions that Datafolha released after the headlines were published, he and others such as the journalist Alex Cuadros believed that the questions posed to those interviewed had been manipulated to prejudice voters against Rousseff in the impeachment suit brought against her.

Luciana Chong, a lawyer for Datafolha, defended the polling institute, alleging "that it was Folha [de S. Paulo], not her polling firm, that determined the questions to be asked."