“It works like a pyramid,” said Nemer, whose research focuses on Bolsonarism, misinformation and social media, and the “human infrastructure” behind political misinformation spread through WhatsApp. “At the top, there are the people who produce disinformation. In the middle, there are Bolsonaro supporters who work like a swarm of bees to spread misinformation on the platform. At the bottom, it is the average Brazilians who are in groups where this misinformation ends up and they, in turn, spread it to other groups they are in.”
Nemer fears that communities make it easier for people at the top to manage these disinformation networks.
Experts like Nemer are right to be concerned. When WhatsApp announced in April that it would not launch the feature until the end of the year, Bolsonaro was reportedly angry that the company would not launch it immediately. In July, federal prosecutors in Brazil reportedly asked the company to delay its launch until after the country’s October elections to prevent the spread of fake news and misinformation.
WhatsApp finally launched the feature four days after Bolsonaro’s defeat. When BuzzFeed News asked if Meta had waited after the election to launch Communities, a WhatsApp spokesperson simply responded: “No.”
After this story was published, a WhatsApp spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the feature was not yet available in Brazil and would not be available until January.
Over the years, WhatsApp has implemented safeguards to curb the spread of misinformation on its platform, such as clearly labeling forwarded messages, a major source of misinformation, and restricting message forwarding to only five groups at a time. Now, the company is imposing an additional limitation: People can only forward messages that are forwarded to them to a single 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 of having a group of groups is great,” he said. “But what’s the point of forward limits when you can now post something to a single ad group and still reach many more people than if you sent a single forward to a single group?”
