Historicism and Eclecticism: The Age of Victor Cousin

WhatsApp and transparency: an analysis on the effects of digital platforms’ opacity in political communication research agendas in Brazil

“…WhatsApp Business has an API for developers, but the ordinary version of the app, aimed at individual use, lacks greater transparency regarding the procedures for scraping data. Thus, most of the research developed around WhatsApp has been anchored either in qualitative analysis strategies, such as ethnography (Cesarino, 2020), or in unauthorized data scraping methods (Piaia;Alves, 2020), which can come up against in the platform's own automated filters aimed at identifying and banishing inauthentic behavior. What often happens is that, as the process involves automation mechanisms, for the data to be collected, the application itself interprets that the action performed is suspicious and inactivates the account that was being used for research, considering that the behavior violates the norms.…”

“…There is a recent but vast literature that has sought to discuss these platforms, with an emphasis on specific services, such as WhatsApp (Bursztyn;Birnbaum, 2019), Telegram (Willaert et al, 2022;Santos;Saldaña;Tsyganova, 2021), and WeChat (Wu;Wall, 2019), among others. And although, among these three examples, Russian and Chinese private messaging services equally pose challenges for their respective contexts, it is WhatsApp, due to its enormous popularity, especially in non-Western countries such as Brazil and India, that has boosted public debate around issues such as the spread of fake news (Resende et al, 2019;Sacramento;Paiva, 2020), and increased distrust in democratic institutions (Piaia;Alves, 2020), political radicalization (Evangelista;Bruno, 2019), and dangerous speech (Saha et al, 2021;Matamoros-Fernández, 2020). In all these cases, there is a lot of discussion about strategies to limit the mass dissemination of certain contents and technical solutions to contain damage to democracy (Resende et al, 2019), but little or nothing has been discussed about the effects of environmental opacity on platform cultures, and values shared by users of these services, nor on the practical challenges for implementing democratic controls and monitoring these media.…”