NEWSLETTER
“It works like a pyramid,” said Nemer, whose research focuses on Bolsonarismo, misinformation and social media, and the “human infrastructure” behind the political misinformation spread via WhatsApp. “At the top, you have people who produce disinformation. In the middle are Bolsonaro supporters who are working like a swarm of bees to spread misinformation on the platform. Ultimately, it is average Brazilians who are in the groups where this misinformation ends up and they, in turn, spread it to other groups that they are in.”
Communities, Nemer fears, will make it easier for people at the top to run these disinformation networks.
Experts like Nemer are right to be concerned. When WhatsApp announced in April that it would not launch the feature until later in the year, Bolsonaro was reportedly angry that the company wasn’t releasing it right away. In July, Brazilian federal prosecutors reportedly asked the company to delay its launch until after the October elections in the country to avoid the spread of false news and misinformation.
WhatsApp finally launched the feature four days after Bolsonaro’s defeat. When asked by BuzzFeed News if Meta had waited after the election to launch Communities, a WhatsApp spokesperson simply replied: “No.”
After this story ran, a WhatsApp spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the feature was not yet available in Brazil and wouldn’t be until January.
Over the years, WhatsApp has put in place safeguards to curb the spread of misinformation on its platform, including clearly labeling forwarded messages, a major source of misinformation, and restricting message forwarding to just five groups at a time. time. Now, the company is putting in an additional limitation: People can only forward messages that are forwarded to them to only one group at a time, instead of five.
“We believe this will significantly reduce the spread of potentially harmful misinformation in community groups,” a WhatsApp spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.
Still, Nemer is skeptical. “The idea, having a group of groups, is great,” he said. “But what’s the point of forwarding limits when you can now post something to a single Ad group and still reach a lot more people than if you had to send a single forward to a single group?”
