Mara Telles isn’t your average Brazilian politician. First, she is a woman running for the Minas Gerais state legislature, where seventy-one out of seventy-seven deputies are men. Then there’s the fact that in a country where 49 percent of federal deputies have relatives who hold office, neither she nor anyone in her family has ever run. On top of that, she is not a lawyer, engineer, businesswoman, landowner, or any of the other professions that largely populate Brazil’s institutions; instead, she’s a university political science professor.

Her claim to fame, other than her scholarship, is her early 2018 appearance on the reality show Big Brother Brasil. When she was voted off, she exited the stage with a shout of “Fora Temer,” in reference to President Michel Temer, who took office via the 2016 parliamentary coup. Other than running for the regional presidency of the Brazilian Political Science Association, she had never thought of running for office. But she chose to run now at the urging of her students, because, as she explained to me, “Brazil is going through a rapid process of the destruction of [our] rights and the dismantling of its institutions.”

Something else makes Telles different from the average Brazilian politician: her social media presence. Historically, Brazilian politicians have relied on face-to-face contact with voters, and since the 1970s, television ads. Although most politicians today have social media accounts, few appear to manage their accounts themselves, instead delegating the task to aides. And as a 2016 study found, only 18 percent of politicians’ social media accounts routinely responded to comments or inquiries from their constituents. Telles, on the other hand, considers herself “a heavyweight on social media,” who has always enjoyed “expressing my opinions freely, spontaneously, and with a dose of humor.” Her following exploded after her reality show appearance, and today she has over 220,000 followers across all her social media platforms.