A Study of Misinformation in WhatsApp groups with a focus on the Brazilian Presidential Elections.

There are rising concerns over the spread of misinformation in WhatsApp groups and the potential impact on political polarization, hindrance of public debate and fostering acts of political violence. As social media use becomes increasingly widespread, it becomes imperative to study how these platforms can be used to as a tool to spread propaganda and manipulate audience groups ahead of important political events. In this paper, we present a grounded typology to classify links to news sources into different categories including ‘junk’ news sources that deliberately publish or aggregate misleading, deceptive or incorrect information packaged as real news about politics, economics or culture obtained from public WhatsApp groups. Further, we examine a sample of 200 videos and images, extracted from a sample of WhatsApp groups and develop a new typology to classify this media content. For our analysis, we have used data from 130 public WhatsApp groups in the period leading up to the two rounds of the 2018 Brazilian presidential elections.