As the Covid-19 pandemic expanded across the world, so did the debates on whether fighting this sanitary emergency would require the use of personal data, and on how that would impact pre-established data protection frameworks.
This paper analyses the spread of misinformation in the context of 2018 Brazilian elections. We give a general overview of the Brazilian political context, its media ecosystem and the weaponisation of the country’s most popular messaging app, WhatsApp, as a political persuasion tool. The current architecture of the platform does not allow, once appropriated for purposes of election campaigns, users to notice or become aware that they are being monitored and managed.