How the environmental opacity of platforms affects the spread of extremist memes on Twitter and WhatsApp.
Research on WhatsApp political memes is still scarce. Nevertheless, since the 2018 Brazilian elections, the platform has attracted the attention of the media in general, after complaints of its use to spread misinformation and extremist messages by supporters of the Bolsonaro Government. Despite this, the effects of the WhatsApp platform on the user practices of sharing memes are still poorly understood. This article proposes a cross-platform comparative approach, between the digital memes on Twitter and those on WhatsApp, to better understand how user practices are affected by some of the structural singularities of these platforms. Based on a sample of 1,794 memes collected on both platforms, this study finds that there is a higher than expected frequency of ideological memes on WhatsApp in relation toTwitter. The findings suggest that WhatsApp’s environmental opacity favors the emergence of an extremist memesphere.
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CHAGAS, V. Far-right memespheres and platform affordances: the effects of environmental opacity on the spread of extremist memes on Twitter and WhatsApp. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 2023.