Case Study 15-2: Brazil's WhatsApp Election — Misinformation in Bolsonaro's 2018 Campaign

Overview

Brazil's 2018 presidential election, in which Jair Bolsonaro defeated Workers' Party candidate Fernando Haddad, became the paradigmatic case study of political misinformation in encrypted private messaging environments. The election demonstrated how WhatsApp — the dominant communication platform in Brazil, used by approximately 120 million Brazilians — created a disinformation environment qualitatively different from those on public social media platforms. The combination of private encrypted channels, business account broadcasting capabilities, and a highly polarized political environment produced a misinformation ecosystem that researchers could observe only partially, that platforms could not easily moderate, and that electoral authorities were largely unprepared to address.

Brazil's Digital Communication Landscape

To understand the 2018 election, one must first understand Brazil's unique digital media environment. WhatsApp, owned by Facebook/Meta since 2014, became Brazil's dominant interpersonal communication platform after the Brazilian government blocked the platform twice in disputes with Facebook over data sharing. Each block, paradoxically, accelerated WhatsApp adoption as Brazilians organized to defeat the blocks. By 2018, WhatsApp was used by approximately 58% of Brazilians, cutting across socioeconomic and age lines more thoroughly than any other platform.

WhatsApp in Brazil functions as a primary news medium, not merely a messaging app. Brazilians share news articles, videos, audio messages, and memes through WhatsApp groups, which can include up to 256 members. Group membership overlaps: an individual in a family group, a neighborhood group, a religious group, a work group, and a political group receives political content through all of these channels simultaneously, experiencing it as coming from trusted personal connections rather than anonymous strangers.

This architecture has profound implications for misinformation dynamics. On Facebook or Twitter, a false story can be traced to its source, labeled by fact-checkers, and have its spread interrupted by platform algorithms. On WhatsApp: - Content is end-to-end encrypted and cannot be monitored at scale - The forward button facilitates rapid spreading without attribution - Content appears to come from trusted personal contacts, lending it credibility - Fact-check labels applied to public social media posts cannot reach content already in private chats - The platform has no algorithmic feed — content reaches recipients because someone in their personal network actively chose to send it

Bolsonaro's Campaign and WhatsApp Strategy

Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain and seven-term congressman from Rio de Janeiro state, built a political following through social media before WhatsApp was central to his strategy. Bolsonaro had cultivated a large following through provocative social media content and had been effectively exiled from traditional media access due to his extreme statements.

The Bolsonaro campaign adapted to Brazil's WhatsApp-dominated information environment through a systematic strategy that Brazilian media and researchers documented during the campaign:

WhatsApp Business accounts: WhatsApp Business accounts, designed for commercial use, allow broadcasting messages to an unlimited number of recipients who have the business registered as a contact. The Bolsonaro campaign and allied organizations created networks of business accounts that could send content to millions of recipients. This circumvented WhatsApp's group-size limit of 256 members.

Campaign material production and distribution: The campaign produced enormous quantities of images, videos, audio clips, and formatted text messages designed for WhatsApp sharing. This content ranged from factually accurate campaign materials to heavily distorted claims to outright fabrications.

Third-party coordination: Much of the most inflammatory content did not come directly from the official campaign but from networks of aligned Bolsonaro supporters, business interests, and anonymous operators. This diffuse production made attribution and accountability difficult.

Documented Misinformation Cases

Brazilian researchers, particularly from FGV DAPP (Fundação Getulio Vargas' department of public policy analysis) and Agência Lupa (a fact-checking organization), documented hundreds of false claims circulating through WhatsApp during the 2018 campaign. Several cases illustrate the patterns:

The "Gay Kit" Fabrication

The most damaging documented misinformation campaign concerned a fabricated claim about the Workers' Party's education policy. The false claim asserted that PT had distributed a "gay kit" to public schools — material promoting homosexuality to children as young as six years old. The claim had roots in an actual political controversy from the Dilma Rousseff government in 2011, when educational materials about sexual diversity were developed but ultimately not distributed after political opposition. The WhatsApp version of the claim dramatically exaggerated and distorted this history, attributing child-inappropriate sexual content to Haddad specifically (who had been São Paulo's mayor, not a national education minister).

The "gay kit" claim circulated in audio messages, forwarded videos, images of alleged "proof," and WhatsApp voice notes — many formats that resist simple fact-checking. In a strongly religious country where evangelical Christianity is a major social force, the claim was effective political content regardless of its accuracy.

Hospital Intimidation Fabrication

Days before the first-round vote, a video circulated on WhatsApp purporting to show a PT activist assaulting a Bolsonaro voter inside a hospital. The video, combined with inflammatory text, presented as evidence that Haddad supporters were violent criminals threatening Bolsonaro voters. Fact-checkers determined the video showed an actual altercation — but occurring in Argentina, unrelated to the Brazilian election.

Electoral Court Blocking Misinformation

As the Bolsonaro campaign flouted electoral regulations around campaign messaging, false claims circulated that the Electoral Court's enforcement actions were actually PT attempts to steal the election — inverting the actual situation to inoculate supporters against legitimate regulatory action.

False Voting Machine Claims

Claims circulated that Brazil's electronic voting machines were being manipulated by PT to steal the election — a precursor to the more elaborate stolen-election narrative Bolsonaro would deploy in 2022 when he lost.

Scale and the Research Problem

Precisely quantifying the WhatsApp misinformation operation faced fundamental methodological challenges: the platform's encryption made large-scale monitoring impossible without user consent. Researchers developed several partial approaches:

Volunteer monitoring networks: The Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) created a network of volunteer WhatsApp group monitors who shared content from political groups with researchers after labeling members with coded identifiers to protect privacy. This enabled some content analysis but was systematically unrepresentative.

Fact-checker tracking: Agência Lupa and other fact-checkers tracked what claims were being submitted to them for fact-checking as a proxy for circulation, but this captured only claims that reached people who sought fact-checks.

Tip-line methodology: WhatsApp provided a tip-line number that Brazilians could use to submit suspicious content for fact-checking. The most common submitted claims provided insight into circulation patterns but again not full-scale data.

From these partial data sources, researchers concluded that: - Tens of thousands of distinct pieces of misinformation circulated during the campaign - A significant fraction of viral political content contained false or substantially misleading claims - The false content disproportionately targeted Haddad and the PT, though pro-PT misinformation also circulated - Misinformation content was more widely shared than accurate political content in some documented samples

The Electoral Court Investigation and Legal Findings

The Brazilian Electoral Court (Tribunal Superior Eleitoral, TSE) investigated the use of WhatsApp Business accounts for campaign messaging. Key findings from these investigations:

Illegal corporate funding: The TSE found evidence that companies had illegally funded mass WhatsApp messaging operations supporting Bolsonaro. This represented a form of illegal campaign finance — corporate contributions to political campaigns are prohibited under Brazilian electoral law.

Scale of the operation: Evidence from the investigation suggested that business accounts were used to send campaign messages to millions of recipients, an operation requiring significant coordination and resources beyond what the official campaign disclosed.

The "Office of Hate": Brazilian media reported on an informal group of Bolsonaro allies who coordinated disinformation production and distribution on WhatsApp and other platforms — dubbed the "Office of Hate" by Brazilian journalists. Documents and testimony in multiple investigations described organized content production aimed at discrediting Bolsonaro opponents and spreading false claims about the PT.

Bolsonaro ultimately faced multiple electoral court investigations and penalties. These legal proceedings continued after his 2018 victory and shaped the environment around his 2022 campaign and subsequent loss.

Platform Responses and Their Limitations

WhatsApp and its parent company Facebook/Meta faced intense criticism for the platform's role in the 2018 Brazilian election. Platform responses included:

Message forwarding limits: In response to evidence about WhatsApp's role in the election, WhatsApp limited forwarding to a maximum of five contacts or groups (reduced from 20), and later to one contact at a time for messages that have been forwarded multiple times. Research suggests this reduced viral spread of specific messages but had limited impact on the overall misinformation ecosystem.

Labeling of forwarded messages: WhatsApp introduced labels indicating when a message was "forwarded" and when it had been forwarded "many times," signaling content spread beyond the sender's personal network. Studies showed this had modest effects on user trust in forwarded content.

Partnership with fact-checkers: WhatsApp partnered with Brazilian fact-checkers including Agência Lupa, offering a tip line where users could forward suspicious content for fact-checking. The fundamental challenge was that by the time fact-checks were produced, content had already reached millions of recipients through private channels that fact-check labels could not retroactively reach.

Account limits: WhatsApp placed limits on how many groups a new account could join quickly, targeting bot-created accounts that joined large numbers of groups to seed content.

None of these interventions addressed the fundamental structural challenge: the platform's core value proposition — private, encrypted communication among trusted contacts — is precisely what makes it effective for political misinformation. There is no intervention that preserves end-to-end encryption and prevents content monitoring while also enabling meaningful content moderation.

Comparisons with the 2022 Brazilian Election

When Bolsonaro ran for re-election in 2022 against Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula), WhatsApp remained central to the information environment. The 2022 campaign showed both continuities and adaptations:

Continued WhatsApp dominance: WhatsApp remained Brazil's primary political communication channel, with even more sophisticated use by aligned content networks.

More elaborate election fraud narrative: Building explicitly on the US 2020 experience, Bolsonaro constructed a more elaborate pre-election stolen election narrative specifically targeting Brazil's electronic voting machines, which he had been attacking for years. When Lula won by a margin of approximately 1.8 million votes, Bolsonaro's supporters had been primed to reject the result.

January 8, 2023: Bolsonaro supporters attacked Brazil's Congress, Presidential Palace, and Supreme Court in Brasília on January 8, 2023 — one year after January 6, 2021 in Washington, with deliberate symbolic parallel. WhatsApp was the primary organizing and mobilization platform for these actions.

Electoral accountability: The Brazilian Electoral Court took more aggressive action against election fraud claims in 2022 than in 2018. The TSE made legal rulings against Bolsonaro for specific statements about voting machine fraud, and in 2023 the court banned Bolsonaro from holding public office for eight years.

Broader Implications

Brazil's 2018 and 2022 elections offer several lessons for understanding political misinformation in encrypted messaging environments:

Regulatory tools designed for broadcast media are inadequate for private messaging: Campaign finance disclosure requirements, content regulations, and fact-checker partnerships all assume content flows through public or semi-public channels. Encrypted private messaging creates a fundamentally different regulatory challenge.

The "trusted network" effect amplifies misinformation belief: Content received from a family member or friend is more credible than content from a stranger. Private messaging contexts exploit this trust in ways that public social media does not.

Scale operations require resources: The mass business account operations documented in Brazil required coordination, resources, and organizational infrastructure. This creates potential legal and financial pressure points even when content cannot be directly moderated.

Platform incentives and national regulatory capacity interact: WhatsApp's encryption policies reflect both privacy values and legal liabilities in multiple countries. The adequacy of Brazilian electoral law for the WhatsApp era was a case study in regulatory lag — rules designed for television and print campaigning proved poorly suited to the WhatsApp environment.

The 2018 Brazil case has been replicated: WhatsApp-based political misinformation at scale has subsequently been documented in India, Indonesia, Germany, and other countries. Brazil was not unique but was among the first and most extensively studied.

Discussion Questions

1. WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption serves genuine privacy values. How should democratic societies balance privacy in communication against the electoral harms of unmoderated private political messaging? Is there a solution that preserves both values?

2. Much of the misinformation circulating on WhatsApp came not from the official Bolsonaro campaign but from a diffuse network of aligned supporters. How should electoral law attribute responsibility for misinformation when the organizational structure is deliberately diffuse?

3. The "gay kit" claim drew on a real political controversy (the 2011 education materials debate) and transformed it into a fabrication. What does this technique — distorting real events rather than inventing completely false ones — tell us about effective disinformation production?

4. The message forwarding limits WhatsApp imposed reduced viral spread but did not eliminate the misinformation problem. What other interventions might platforms implement within an encrypted messaging context? What are the trade-offs of each?

5. Brazil's January 8, 2023 attack on government buildings occurred more than two months after Bolsonaro's electoral loss. How did sustained WhatsApp-based misinformation during the campaign contribute to this delayed violent response?

Key Sources

• Machado, Caio, et al. "A Study of Misinformation in WhatsApp Groups with a Focus on the Brazilian Presidential Elections." Companion Proceedings of the 2019 World Wide Web Conference. 2019.
• Cesarino, Letícia. "How Social Media Algorithms Can Shape Political Reality: A Case Study of Brazil's 2018 General Elections." Political Geography 89, 2021.
• Agência Lupa. "Fact-checking reports on the 2018 Brazilian election." Various dates.
• FGV DAPP. "Disinformation and Propaganda in the Brazilian Electoral Process." 2018.
• Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (TSE). Investigation reports on WhatsApp campaign messaging. 2018-2019.
• Evangelista, Rafael, and Fernanda Bruno. "WhatsApp and Political Instability in Brazil: Targeted Messages and Political Radicalisation." Internet Policy Review 8(4), 2019.
• Phillips, Dom. "WhatsApp fake news during Brazil election 'favoured Bolsonaro.'" The Guardian, October 26, 2018.