How YouTube Misinformation Resolved a WhatsApp Mystery in Brazil

Conventional wisdom has said that WhatsApp, a popular messaging service owned by Facebook, played a major and potentially decisive role in circulating false information that drove Brazilians toward the long-shot, far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro.

But the more we looked, the harder it became to square this with what we knew about social media and what we were finding in Brazil.
For another, the more we looked at the rise of Brazil’s far right, the more we encountered stories of radicalization and misinformation that centered not on WhatsApp but on YouTube, which even many far-right politicians cite as a deciding factor in their elections.

We landed in Brazil hoping to unravel this seeming mystery. What had really happened there, why were so many observers crediting it to WhatsApp and what did it mean about the power of social media to distort or upend democracies worldwide?

Everything began to click into place when we met Luciana Brito, a soft-spoken clinical psychologist who works with families affected by the Zika virus.

Her work had put her on the front lines of the struggle against conspiracy theories, threats and hatred swirling on both platforms. And it allowed her to see what we — like so many observers — had missed: that WhatsApp and YouTube had come to form a powerful, and at times dangerous, feedback loop of extremism and misinformation.