"This article investigates harmful political content in public WhatsApp and Facebook groups of the radical Right in Brazil. Considering harmful political content as that which generates direct damage to the quality, reasonableness, and plurality of public discussion, we investigate the enunciative a
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spects of four specific types of discursive action (uncivil, conspiratorial, hateful, and dangerous) and the non-enunciative aspects used for harmful types of communication and interaction. The database consists of 3,503,540 messages propagated in 1,676 public groups during the electoral process. Through a quantitative approach to a sample of 2,201 unique messages, we found, among other things, that (1) harmful content was more present on Facebook than on WhatsApp; (2) messages about the elections were associated with uncivil speech; (3) uncivil speech was usually associated with dangerous speech and opposed to conspiratorial speech. The results allow for more nuanced reflections on the actions and strategy of the Far Right in the digital public debate." (Abstract)
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"El análisis revela los desafíos al proceso de construcción de soluciones reguladoras que protejan derechos y sean efectivas para promover el acceso a información confiable. La desinformación está profundamente entrelazada con los procesos políticos y sociales, y no es posible pensar en soluc
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iones legales y reguladoras aisladamente del entendimiento de estos procesos y de los contextos nacionales y locales." (Resumen)
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"This article brings the results of an investigation into the role of WhatsApp audio messages in the 2018 Brazilian presidential elections, proposing that instant voice messaging borrows elements from radio language. We started from a broader research, conducted by the Brazilian National Institute o
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f Science and Technology in Digital Democracy (INCT.DD, in its Portuguese acronym), which identified a network composed of 220 WhatsApp groups – all of them with open-entry links – supporting six different candidates. Those groups put together thousands of anonymized profiles linked through connections to similar groups, configuring an extensive network. More than 1 million messages, including 98,000 audios, were gathered and downloaded during 2018 Brazilian electoral period (from June to October). We focused on eighteen audios with major circulation (totalling 3622 appearances) among the ones shared at least 100 times, which were extracted and analysed. The use of radio content analysis techniques pointed out strong evidence that audio messaging remediate radiophonic elements such as intimacy and colloquial language to accelerate disinformation campaigns." (Abstract)
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