The Effects of Deactivating Users from WhatsApp: An Experiment in Brazil

• In Event: Countering Misinformation in the Global South

Abstract

For years WhatsApp has been the primary social media application in many Global South countries. Numerous journalist and scholarly accounts suggest that the platform has become a fertile ground for the spread of polarizing content and political misinformation rumors, with some going so far as to assert that WhatsApp could have impacts on electoral outcomes, episodes of violence, and vaccine hesitancy around the world. However, no studies so far have been able to show causal links between WhatsApp usage and these alleged changes in citizens' attitudes and behavior. To fill this gap, we conducted a field experiment that reduced users' exposure to media content shared on WhatsApp activity during the Presidential election in Brazil. Our field experiment randomly assigns users to a Media-Constrained WhatsApp, in which we incentivized them not to access any media, image, or video received during the weeks before the election on October 3, 2022. After conducting our Media-Constrained WhatsApp Deactivation for three weeks, we collect survey data from our participants to measure the effects of the deactivation on their ability to identify misinformation, levels of political polarization, and subjective well-being. Our results indicate that removing access to multimedia content on WhatsApp significantly reduces users’ exposure to popular misinformation rumors. These effects are twice the size of a reduction in mainstream media exposure, which we also verified as an effect of the deactivation. However, beyond a reduction in exposure, we uncover results that provide support for a minimalist view of the effects of WhatsApp on attitudes. We do not detect significant effects for beliefs to the same misinformation rumors, as well as aggregate polarization index or subjective well-being. Our study contributes to the growing literature on the causal effects of reducing social media usage on political attitudes and behavior. We extend this literature by focusing on WhatsApp, the largest and most significant social media application in many Global South democracies.

Authors

• Tiago Augusto da Silva Ventura, Georgetown University

• Rajeshwari Majumdar, Yale University

• Jonathan Nagler, New York University

• Joshua A. Tucker, New York University