Research note: Bolsonaro’s firehose: How Covid-19 disinformation on WhatsApp was used to fight a government political crisis in Brazil

Abstract

Brazil has one of the highest rates of cases and deaths attributed to Covid-19 in the world. Two factors contributed to the high rates: the Brazilian government underestimated the pandemic and a large amount of disinformation was spread through social media. We found that disinformation about Covid-19 on WhatsApp was associated with political disinformation, mostly composed to support president Bolsonaro during the crisis he faced at the beginning of the pandemic. Our main finding implicates that disinformation on WhatsApp was connected to the far-right political discourse and framed Covid-19 as a political issue rather than a public health issue. We used WhatsApp Monitor (Resende et al., 2018) to collect the most shared textual messages from more than 500 public political groups in Brazil during March and April 2020. Our final dataset was composed of 802 messages that contained some type of disinformation about Covid-19. For this dataset, we used content analysis to categorize the types of disinformation and the topics of these messages. We returned to our dataset for a more in-depth qualitative analysis to make inferences about the quantitative results. Disinformation on WhatsApp political groups was often connected to conspiracy theories, such as alleged plots by the “leftists,” the Brazilian Supreme Court, and by media outlets to overthrow or.