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Online betting ads on CazéTV during the World Cup have reignited the debate over the medium, the message and the responsibility of digital platforms and AI.
By José Brito — journalist, founder of Pupa Educação Digital and teacher at the AI and Digital Education Lab of Colégio MOPI, in Rio de Janeiro.
“Technology is life. In general, we fear what we do not understand. Very often we do not understand generative AI, and we consume it without any idea of what we are doing. And we pay a very high price for that. Today we no longer speak of the fundamental right to reality, but of the right to an authentic reality.”
Edilene Lôbo — specialist in criminal procedure, professor at PUC-Minas, substitute justice of Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE) and the first Black woman to sit on the country’s electoral court.
[Cover image] Pixel-art illustration in retro 16-bit style on a dark purple background. At the center, an old television set glows with a football on screen, coins to the left and a brain that is half organic, half circuitry to the right. Two robots flank the screen: on the left, one wearing Indigenous ornaments holds a magnifying glass; on the right, a robot with an Afro points at the screen. Icons around them stand for digital literacy, financial warning, electoral integrity and this edition’s reading pick.
Aaaaaand the referee gives the go-ahead — the match is on!!! Another 45 minutes of football. Split screen. The ball rolling. Millions of connected devices, mine among them. Over the past few years, Casimiro Miguel — Brazil’s most-watched livestreamer — and his team have reinvented the standards of engagement with audiences, and with the advertising market too. Big brands that until very recently were queuing up for prime-time slots on broadcast television are now exploring new formats built on direct relationships with digital influencers. Nothing new so far.
Casimiro is a partner at LiveMode and the founder of CazéTV, a digital channel that streams major sporting events, the World Cup included. This week, CazéTV set a world record with roughly 21 million simultaneous devices during Brazil vs. Japan — the highest live audience peak in YouTube’s history.
What stirred debate, however, was the festival of online betting tips mixed into the advertising during those broadcasts. What looks like a tip from a friend is, in fact, paid content. And that is where access to information becomes essential to separate the wheat from the chaff. I say this because, besides being a journalist and a teacher, I am the father of a pre-teen who, as things stand, has no content rating system to guide her when she watches football over the internet. Perhaps she will not need one in the future, but something can be done now. So here we are. What is the medium, what is the message, what is a recommendation from someone with credibility, and what is advertising? The question has spread to other arenas and has landed once again in Brazil’s National Congress. And it has everything to do with the choices we make about information, and with the decisions we take in the digital environment.
This week I was at PUC-Rio for “Jornalismo.IA: elections in the age of artificial intelligence”, organized by Redes Cordiais and the Institute for Technology and Society of Rio (ITS Rio), with support from the German Consulate in Rio de Janeiro. The auditorium brought together journalists, researchers, representatives of the electoral courts and technology specialists to discuss what artificial intelligence is doing — and will do — to campaign advertising in the 2026 election cycle.
The opening was given by Edilene Lôbo, a specialist in criminal procedure, professor at PUC-Minas and substitute justice of the TSE, the first Black woman to sit on Brazil’s electoral court. Among many recent milestones, she spoke of the appropriation of voters’ sensitive data as “the new oil”, and placed an important conceptual shift at the center of the debate: we no longer speak simply of the fundamental right to the reality we find out on the street, but of the right to an authentic reality — one that often arrives disguised as a promotion on the internet. The content recommendations we meet on digital platforms and in WhatsApp groups, including the streaming links for major events such as the World Cup, come wrapped in other messages that go well beyond pop culture.
Figures from Procon-SP, the consumer protection agency of the state of São Paulo, help to grasp the scale of the problem. A survey of 2,724 consumers carried out between December 2025 and January 2026 found that 4 in 10 bettors fell into debt after betting online, that 56.6% feel influenced by celebrity advertising when they place a bet, and that 30% commit more than R$1,000 a month to betting. Those numbers have called into question an advertising model that, in practice, blends entertainment with an incentive to spend. CazéTV announced this week that its commentators will no longer promote betting during this World Cup — an important step. The government, for its part, has signaled that it will require harm warnings in betting advertising, and the Ministry of Justice has opened an investigation into possible abusive advertising. This debate has a long way to run.
We need to talk about this because we have seen this film before. I remember it well. For decades, cigarette advertising was a spectacle of seduction: the commercials for Hollywood — a Brazilian cigarette brand — with surfers and extreme sports in the Namibian desert, the Marlboro logo stuck on Formula 1 cars, Ayrton Senna’s McLaren included, and the whole logic of Brazilian beer advertising, awash with women in bikinis and toasts on the beach.
From then to now, it took someone raising their voice. And society, science and regulation sounded the alarm. Not because people could not smoke, drink or watch motor racing, but because that model of exposure crossed a line: it induced consumption without disclosing the risks, and it aimed at those who did not yet have the tools to make informed choices.
Online betting is the new frontier for young people. It can be addictive, it can lead to debt, and the line between entertainment and financial trap is far too thin to be left unattended. A child or a teenager can watch a football match on YouTube and, in that very same environment, be exposed to a betting advertising model with no equivalent limits. If beer cannot be advertised on a children’s channel, how should we be thinking about the next steps for betting advertising on the internet? We have enough information to propose a course correction, all the more so with AI-driven predictive models widening the reach of that inducement. And that correction has everything to do with the digital literacy for access to information that was debated at the PUC event.
Every generation will be more digital than the one before it. That is why the content recommendations we receive — in election campaigns, in football broadcasts, in social media feeds — have to be met with preparation. At any moment, on any screen, we are being steered by some system with an interest in our click, our vote or our money. The question this week leaves us with is simple and urgent: who is preparing us for this?
A shout-out here to Raphael Kapa, of Agência Lupa, Victor Vicente, projects director at Redes Cordiais, and Karina Santos, of the Institute for Technology and Society. I ran into all three at the event and we forgot to take a photo. Of course we did.
Enjoy the read!
#1 Journalism and elections in the age of AI
Redes Cordiais and ITS Rio brought together journalists, researchers and representatives of the electoral courts to debate regulation and electoral integrity in the face of AI.
🔗 Source: Redes Cordiais
#2 The betting World Cup and the new frontier of online advertising
Carolina Terra, of ECA/USP, and Mauricio Stycer, of Folha de S.Paulo, examine the promotion of betting during the World Cup on CazéTV and the changes under way in Brazilian law.
🔗 Source: Café da Manhã — Folha de S.Paulo | Spotify
#3 Media education enters a new phase: the attention economy
Researcher Renee Hobbs, of the University of Rhode Island, argues that students need to understand how the platforms’ attention economy works. A civic skill, not merely a pedagogical one.
🔗 Source: Renee Hobbs — Substack
#4 Porvir rounds up AI tools for lesson planning
Five tools to help teachers plan lessons, create assessments and produce materials with the support of generative AI: Curipod, Gamma, Wepik, Question Well and Eduaide.
🔗 Source: Porvir
#5 Brazil’s Education Ministry launches national study on the school phone ban
The debate on screen use and education takes on the dimension of evidence-based public policy with a new survey, one year after phones were restricted in schools.
🔗 Source: Jornal de Brasília
READING 📚
Book: BRASIL, UMA BIOGRAFIA
Authors: Lilia Schwarcz and Heloisa Starling
Publisher: Companhia das Letras
Year: 2023
I spent time with Lilia Schwarcz during a series of interviews on the history of Brazil. That was some ten years ago. She now holds chair number 9 at the Brazilian Academy of Letters. I follow her on Instagram. Always with good reflections on the journeys and the setbacks that brought us here. Over time, every social achievement, every change in the law, every technological novelty has a historical path behind it that took decades to consolidate. The Brazil that regulated cigarette and alcohol advertising, that created the Consumer Protection Code, the Internet Civil Rights Framework and the Digital Child and Adolescent Statute, that built the electronic ballot box and an electoral system that is a global reference. None of it happened by chance. There were disputes, setbacks and advances, exactly as Lilia Schwarcz and Heloisa Starling recount in Brazil: A Biography. What we are doing now, in the debate on platforms, on advertising, on digital literacy, is material for this country’s next biography. And that one is still being written.
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