The second round of the 2018 Brazilian presidential elections was a milestone in the country's
recent history due to the radicalization of polarization in the left-right dyad and also to the
massive spread through social networks and misinformation groups and WhatsApp, popularly
known as fake news. Amalgamated on the premise that online misinformation poses a threat to
democracy given its potential to distort public opinion, create ideologies and preferences,
including policies, this work arose from the need to understand the circulation of political
misinformation in WhatsApp groups during the second presidential elections. 50 contents
received on WhatsApp and checked by fact-checking websites were investigated. The objective
is to identify the typology of this false information by comparing it with the model applied by
First Draft - an American, non-profit project that studies misinformation worldwide. The main
theoretical framework comes from Hunt Allcott e Matthew Gentzkow (2017), Hannah Arendt
(1967;1999;2001;2002), Aristóteles (2001), and Clarie Wardle (2017). With this study, it was
identified that the misinformation found during the researched period would follow the existing
models identified by First Draft. In this scenario, the hypotheses about the standardization of
fake Brazilian political news were confirmed along the same lines already applied in other
countries, such as the 2016 US presidential elections. The expanded reach of WhatsApp was
also confirmed, through how far messages are spread, as a relevant part of the proliferation of
misinformation. As a result, it was found that most of the contents analyzed refer directly to
candidate Jair Bolsonaro and, of these, most of them benefited him and / or harmed his
opponent, candidate Fernando Haddad, his party or members of his ticket. Thus, respecting
territorial, circumstantial and cultural differences, in Brazil the political misinformation that
circulated in WhatsApp groups during the second round of the 2018 presidential elections
followed the pattern established in the United States, as studied by First Draft.
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