“…Although it does not favor the production of original journalism, Whatsapp is a key piece of the Brazilian media ecosystem as it interacts with the flows of other platforms and traditional media (Piaia & Alves, 2020). WhatsApp and Telegram took a strategic role in the orchestration of disinformation campaigns during the Brazilian elections of 2018 and 2022, which accentuated political polarization (Chagas, 2022;Moreira Cesar & Santos, 2020;Baptista et al, 2019), and their role in spreading disinformation across Africa is considerable (Wasserman & Madrid-Morales, 2022). Recently, the Covid-19 pandemic found fertile ground to disseminate conspiracy theories and "reinformation" initiatives in the digital environment.…”