Elections on WhatsApp

This project aims to compose an investigative overview of the uses of social media in the local political-electoral context of Rio de Janeiro and in the Brazilian context more broadly. In the 2018 national election, the main novelty in the digital campaign environment was an opaque model of informal campaigning, built from private networks on mobile devices through applications such as WhatsApp (see Chagas et al., 2019a; Chagas et al., 2019b). The proposal now presented continues the investigative efforts already carried out on that occasion, and aims to focus, now, on the use of private messaging platforms, notably WhatsApp, in subsequent electoral campaigns, such as the 2020 and 2024 campaigns for the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, and the 2022 and 2026 campaigns for the presidency of the Republic. The research aims to map the campaign’s mobilization and coordination networks, made up of both formal and informal agents, and to investigate their organizational models, as well as to understand processes of content circulation and volunteer mobilization from these same groups. The project starts from two more general questions to outline a set of more specific hypotheses, directly related to the campaigns developed within WhatsApp. Initially, we intend to assess whether and how the messages circulated through these applications are part of a campaign ecosystem alongside other platforms already widely used by political actors, such as Facebook and Twitter. In addition, our expectation is also to investigate to what extent mobile technologies, in particular smartphones and applications such as WhatsApp, enable us to recognize new forms of political action undertaken by ordinary citizens and incorporated by electoral campaign managers. We hope to understand in depth how mobile networks are mobilized for the campaign, whether or not communication professionals are involved in disseminating messages to WhatsApp groups and other applications, and what kind of content circulates in these channels.