Far-right memespheres and platform affordances: the effects of environmental opacity on the spread of extremist memes on Twitter and WhatsApp

ABSTRACT

Research on WhatsApp political memes is still scarce. Nevertheless, since the 2018 Brazilian elections, the platform has attracted the attention of the media in general, after complaints of its use to spread misinformation and extremist messages by supporters of the Bolsonaro Government. Despite this, the effects of the WhatsApp platform on the user practices of sharing memes are still poorly understood. This article proposes a cross-platform comparative approach, between the digital memes on Twitter and those on WhatsApp, to better understand how user practices are affected by some of the structural singularities of these platforms. Based on a sample of 1,794 memes collected on both platforms, this study finds that there is a higher than expected frequency of ideological memes on WhatsApp in relation to Twitter. The findings suggest that WhatsApp’s environmental opacity favors the emergence of an extremist memesphere.

KEYWORDS:

• Political memes
• cross-platform studies
• WhatsApp
• Twitter
• far-right

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge José Victor Ramos Cardoso for the intercoder reliability tests.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Ethics approvals

This study was approved by the Brazilian National Ethics Committee, permission No. 4.093.679. Requirement for consent from all the subjects was waived by the ethics committee.

Notes

1 https://link.estadao.com.br/noticias/empresas,whatsapp-chega-a-120-milhoes-de-usuarios-no-brasil,70001817647 (Last access: 25 January 2021).

2 https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/geral/noticia/2019-12/whatsapp-e-principal-fonte-de-informacao-do-brasileiro-diz-pesquisa (Last access: 25 January 2021).

3 Vaporwave was originally a genre of electronic music and visual art, characterized by glitch motives, cyberpunk tropes and satirical jokes with pop culture elements. Later on, it was turned into an alt-right aesthetic trend and got associated with extremist movements (Bogerts & Fielitz, 2019).

4 Good-morning memes are motivational messages, presented mostly as images with flower and cute animal motives. It is a common genre in Brazil and other countries like India. See https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-internet-is-filling-up-because-indians-are-sending-millions-of-good-morning-texts-1516640068 (Last access: 17 May 2021).

5 Codebook and datasets used in this study are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.13643342.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), under grant [no. 306791/2021-8]; and Carlos Chagas Filho Foundation for Research Support of the State of Rio de Janeiro (Faperj), under grant [no. E-26/010.001563/2019 and SEI-260003/004786/2021].