The profile picture of the WhatsApp group #United Against The Coup. facebook.com/UnidosContraOGolpe.SC/
Digital sociologist Sérgio Barbosa explores the role of chat app activism in democratic mobilization and local participation against the background of turbulent political episodes in Brazil.
With a population of more than 215 million, Brazil is one of the largest democracies in the Global South. The extreme inequality in the country has multiple dimensions. One is that a significant part of the semi-illiterate population gathers its information almost solely through audio and video messages on WhatsApp groups. This is thanks to the zero-rating fees provided by telecom companies to Meta, which means that Brazilians still have unlimited use of WhatsApp even if their internet access is no longer covered by their telecom plan. As a consequence, there is a huge dependence on WhatsApp as a daily problem-solving platform. The app, which Brazilians nicknamed ZapZap, is used to find and share news. It is also frequently used as a primary form of communication.
The Rise of WhatsAppers
The WhatsAppers are everyday activists using the app to organize, communicate, and foster emerging forms of political participation at the local level. They have appropriated a commercial chat platform as a means to participate in political life. Engagement with chat app-based activism is an intimate affair, mediated by affordances, that enables local participation. Any average citizens could in theory be a WhatsApper, including those not previously politically active. They interact digitally with others through closed messaging communities, where online and offline arenas are most of the time very blurred.
WhatsApp stands out as an emerging space of political participation for three main reasons. First, it affords structurally collective engagement and boosts interpersonal trust. Second, it forges communities of mutual interest. Third, it promotes internal decision-making processes on the scale of small groups. My research on chat app-based technologies that bypass the traditional structure of how grassroots engage in Brazil has focused on the interactions of two progressive chat groups in Florianópolis, the capital city of the state of Santa Catarina in the south of the country.
“#United Against the Coup” was created in March 2016 by a political activist in Florianópolis in the run-up to the parliamentary vote on the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. The group opposed this “soft coup” and later demanded her return to the presidency. At the onset, virtually all participants were listed as group administrators on a private chat, which enabled each one of them to add or to exclude members. The still active group is heterogeneous, including professionals, journalists, and students, with a minority from other parts of the country. It brings together experienced activists (for example, trade unionists) and newcomers to active politics. It hosts political content (for example, news, images, links, memes, and videos), calls to protests, and reflections and heated debates about Brazil’s turbulent situation. The group organized the “vomitaço” (super puke) action, in which members at the same time posted comments with vomit stickers on the Facebook profile of the party of Vice-President Michel Temer, who assumed the presidency after Rousseff.
“#Campeche and South of the Island Popular Struggle Committee” was created in October 2022 by a grassroots activist from the Campeche neighborhood in Florianópolis in the run-up to the 2022 elections, uniting existing local groups of the south of the island. It opposed the political movement of President Jair Bolsonaro and aimed to drive votes for Lula da Silva. It is still active with 168 participants: local residents including retired people, grassroots activists, and local councilors, mostly based in Campeche. They position themselves as defenders of democracy promoting equality and social change, mainly in the neighborhood and nearby areas of the south of the island. The group organized before the elections the “bandeiraço” (super flags) street action in which members called for on-the-ground actions and brought flags in support of Lula.
“#United Against the Coup” and “#Campeche and South of the Island Popular Struggle Committee” are local initiatives that did not derive from a programmatic structure but evolved organically from WhatsAppers’ lived experiences. They embraced a varied repertoire of actions that blur the lines between online and offline: information-sharing (diffusion of news ignored by mainstream media); creative platform-bound protest (calls to action and deployment of creativity and art through online and ground activities); interpersonal communication as collective engagement (“direct replies” as dialogue between group members); bottom-up organization (absence of formal leadership, and decision-making based on heated discussions through chat messages, with many agendas coexisting through flexible management); networks of solidarity (based on common interests and, values and collective ideas); and connections to other WhatsApp groups, including offsprings of the “mother group,” to engage in specific activities.
The Dark Side
In January 2019, Brazil first far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, took office, with the 2016 “soft coup” against Rousseff jump-starting the campaign that led to his election. Bolsonaro’s victory was based on the massive spread of mis/disinformation through WhatsApp public and private groups, which was facilitated by the deep penetration of the app in Brazil. The platform was used as a flywheel of mis/disinformation with Bolsonaro supporters sharing malicious content with regional and local activists, who then spread it further widely in social media platforms. I call this the dark side of WhatsAppers, as this process is widely facilitated by the capillarity of WhatsApp private and public groups. This fosters a “pipeline” for inaccurate content that originates from WhatsApp groups to spread as widely as possible.
In the first year of Bolsonaro’s presidency, Brazil experienced record Amazon deforestation. He also attacked the press and severely mismanaged the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, Brazilians were bombarded with pandemic-related disinformation while far-right activists took to the streets against the lockdown. In the 2022 elections, Telegram and Tik Tok were also weaponized alongside WhatsApp groups by far-right groups to spread mis/disinformation. However, the Electoral Supreme Court was more prepared to react to this wave of disinformation.
Reinventing the Chat App Ecosystem
WhatsAppers had a clear pro-democracy agenda and strategy to promote bottom-up arenas to fight political turbulence. During the hardest period of COVID-19, they also used high-speed participatory decision-making to deliver groceries, collect money, produce masks, share scientific information, mobilize against disinformation, reach vulnerable population, and fight for emergent political imaginaries. Both groups studied remain active on WhatsApp, using it as a channel for internal communication, and a progressive agenda.
The current challenge is to understand WhatsApp-based activism through its paramount importance at the local level to organize day-to-day activities, to unite for a common political cause with low participation costs, and to promote local social change. It is also to situate WhatsAppers and contextualize their appropriation in the Global South. In other words, the challenge is to see everyday activism beyond large-scale social mobilization in Europe and United States, and to reinvent how accurate information can be also disseminated on chat app ecosystems in a massive and creative way.
Sérgio Barbosa is a PhD candidate at the University of Coimbra. He is a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society, TU Graz. He was a Digital Humanism Junior Visiting Fellow at the IWM in 2023.
