// WhatsApp and political instability in Brazil: targeted messages and political radicalisation | Artigo de Fernanda Bruno e Rafael Evangelista

Publicado o artigo em inglês WhatsApp and political instability in Brazil: targeted messages and political radicalisation escrito por Fernanda Bruno e Rafael Evangelista no Dossiê Data-driven elections (Eleições dirigidas por dados), uma edição especial da Internet Policy Review, editada por Colin J. Bennett e David Lyon.

A partir da descrição do cenário político-eleitoral  e da estratégia de comunicação da campanha presidencial de Jair Bolsonaro em 2018,  o artigo foca o uso do aplicativo de mensagens WhatsApp para abordar questões comomicrodirecionamento de conteúdo político, radicalização ideológica, o papel da mídia tradicional e do ecossistema midiático altamente concentrado e a propagação de desinformação.

Resumo (em inglês)

In the 2018 presidential election, Brazil elected a fringe congressman, Jair Bolsonaro, despite his radical rhetoric that would suffice to shake the public image of any candidate in the world and the lack of traditional resources of his campaign. One of the hypotheses for this electoral success is that his campaign built a specific communication strategy that used internet platforms to communicate directly with different groups of voters. We describe the Brazilian electoral scenario of 2018, focusing on the use of the messaging app WhatsApp. We discuss how Bolsonaro’s campaign tapped into sentiments and perceptions spread by the legacy media, adding a stronger conservatism. We gather evidence of centralised management of WhatsApp chat groups by political actors that emerge from the work of computer scientists research, newspaper articles and our own ethnographic work. The radicalisation of Brazilian politics could be partially explained as an effect of the use of political micro-targeting in a highly concentrated news media ecosystem, and zero-rating policies that fuels WhatsApp popularity, a platform with affordances that favours the spread of misinformation.

O artigo pode ser baixado no site da revista e aqui:

WhatsApp and political instability in Brazil_ targeted messages and political radicalisation – 2020-01-16

Como citar: EVANGELISTA, Rafael; BRUNO, Fernanda. WhatsApp and political instability in Brazil: targeted messages and political radicalization. Internet Policy Review, v. 8, p. 1-23, 2019. Disponível em: https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/whatsapp-and-political-instability-brazil-targeted-messages-and-political