Thousands of Small, Constant Rallies: A Large-Scale Analysis of Partisan WhatsApp Groups
Published in Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, 2020
Recommended citation: Victor S. Bursztyn and Larry Birnbaum. 2019. Thousands of small, constant rallies: a large-scale analysis of partisan WhatsApp groups. In Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 484–488. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3341161.3342905 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3341161.3342905
There is growing concern about the use of social platforms to push political narratives during elections. One very recent case is Brazil’s, where WhatsApp is now widely perceived as a key enabler of the far-right’s rise to power. In this paper, we perform a large-scale analysis of partisan WhatsApp groups to shed light on how both right- and left-wing users leveraged the platform in the 2018 Brazilian presidential election. Across its two rounds, we collected more than 2.8M messages from over 45k users in 232 public groups (175 rightwing vs. 57 left-wing). After describing how we obtained a sample that is many times larger than previous works, we compare right- and left-wing users on their social network metrics, regional distribution, content-sharing habits, and most characteristic news sources.