Elected officials, political analysts, and nonprofit organizations have for years spotlighted the spread of online election information in Western democracies—largely with a focus on media platforms popular in these nations, such as X and Facebook.
But in most of the world—notably the Global South—misinformation often reaches citizens through social messaging apps, including WhatsApp. Most often, falsehoods are shared on these platforms through multimedia content, such as easy-to-share videos and images.
Recognizing this, a team of researchers at New York University's Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP) studied the behavior of WhatsApp users during the 2022 presidential election in Brazil.
They found that deactivating access to multimedia content (video and images) on the platform reduced the recall of false rumors that circulated widely online during the pre-election weeks, suggesting that the spread of disinformation could be stymied by avoiding social media content.
However, the team's experiments also showed that deactivating multimedia content reduced recall of true news headlines—but at a considerably lower rate compared to the reduction in misinformation exposure.
More significantly, while deactivation significantly reduced self-reported exposure to false news—consistent with previous studies—the experimental results showed no difference in whether or not participants believed in false news. The findings also found no changes in levels of polarization, indicating that a reduction in exposure to potentially polarizing political content might not stem rising levels of polarization.
"There is widespread concern that social media plays a crucial role in the spread of online misinformation," says Tiago Ventura, a CSMaP postdoctoral researcher at the time of the study and the lead author of the paper , which appears in The Journal of Politics. "However, even though WhatsApp has been central to these concerns in the Global South, research on its effects has been scarce.
"While our results show this impact may be more limited than many may have assumed, it would be a mistake to conclude that WhatsApp plays no role in politics—its use as a coordination and mobilization tool after Brazil's 2022 election is well-documented ."
Ventura, now an assistant professor at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy, adds that accuracy assessments were not uniform across WhatsApp users.
"Those who received political content on WhatsApp multiple times a day improved their capacity to identify false rumors," explains Ventura. "However, those who rarely received political news via WhatsApp became significantly worse at identifying misinformation."
In conducting their study, the researchers recruited Brazilian participants for an experiment that ran during the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, starting September 15 and ending on October 5 (three days after its first round).
A group of nearly 800 participants was split into two groups: the treatment group and the control group. The treatment group was asked to turn off their automatic downloads of multimedia (video and images) on WhatsApp and to not consume any media on WhatsApp for three weeks; the control group was asked to not consume any media on WhatsApp for only three days. Compliance was confirmed by participants reporting records of their overall WhatsApp data storage, with lower data totals reflecting diminished WhatsApp consumption of multimedia content for the treatment group.
At the end of the three-week period, the participants read a series of news summaries related to the election. Some were true; others were false. They were asked which stories they could recall seeing on social media. The study's authors then matched the recollection of the participants for both false and true stories to their WhatsApp usage during the studied period in order to illuminate any relationship between platform usage and misinformation.
"Our study shows the continued importance of moving beyond what we know about the impact of social media usage on politics in the United States," concludes NYU Professor Joshua A. Tucker, co-director of CSMaP and one of the paper's authors. "The vast majority of social media users reside outside of the United States, so we must continue subjecting what we think we know about social media to different populations and platforms."
The paper's other authors were Rajeshwari Majumdar, a former NYU doctoral student and now a postdoctoral associate at Yale University's Identity and Conflict Lab, and NYU Professor Jonathan Nagler, co-director of CSMaP.
Support for the research was provided by John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Siegel Family Endowment.
