On Sunday night, a few hours after winning a fourth term, Lula told a crowd on Avenida Paulista that from now on he would talk to his supporters through a WhatsApp channel instead of through the press. A channel run by a congressman, André Janones, which had grown from about 55,000 followers to more than 10 million in the three weeks before the vote. We wrote up how that channel worked, mission by mission.
Eight years ago WhatsApp was also where Brazil's presidential race was fought, but almost all of it happened where nobody outside could see. This is the story of how one became the other. It's a story about WhatsApp, about Brazil's electoral court, and about a country that does its politics in family group chats.
Why WhatsApp, and why Brazil
WhatsApp is on almost every phone in Brazil. In 2020 a Mobile Time and Opinion Box survey found it installed on 99% of Brazilian smartphones. People use it for family, church, work, school and buying things.
Price helped make it this central. For years Brazilian carriers sold prepaid plans with "zero rating": WhatsApp and Facebook didn't count against your data. Luca Belli, a researcher at FGV, pointed out in 2018 that nearly three-quarters of Brazilian internet users were on prepaid plans in 2016, according to CETIC.br. If WhatsApp is free and the rest of the internet isn't, receiving a political story costs nothing and checking it costs data.
So politics arrives in Brazil the way everything else does: forwarded into a group by someone you know.
2018: the election that ran in the dark
In 2018 Jair Bolsonaro ran with a small party and very little TV time, and won. A lot of his campaign ran through WhatsApp groups, organized like a pyramid, with content passing from core groups down to everyone's family chat. We've written about how that machine worked.
Ten days before the runoff, Folha de S.Paulo reporter PatrĂcia Campos Mello revealed that companies were buying mass-messaging packages against the PT, with contracts of up to R$12 million. If true, that was illegal twice over: companies can't donate to campaigns in Brazil, and the spending was never declared. Havan, one of the companies named, denied it.
A year later, WhatsApp admitted the core of it. In October 2019, at a festival in MedellĂn, the company's elections lead Ben Supple said the 2018 election had seen mass messaging by companies that broke WhatsApp's terms to reach huge numbers of people. Campaigning on WhatsApp was fine, he said, as long as it was organic, without automated tools or bulk sending. WhatsApp banned more than 400,000 Brazilian accounts during the 2018 campaign.
The important thing about 2018 is that most of it was invisible. Groups are private. Nobody outside could see what was being sent, by whom, or how far it went. Researchers and fact-checkers had to get themselves into public groups to sample what was moving.
2019 to 2022: the rules catch up
Both WhatsApp and Brazil's electoral court (the TSE) spent the next four years trying to make 2018 harder to repeat.
WhatsApp went after forwarding. In January 2019 it limited forwarding to five chats at a time worldwide, a rule it had first tried in India. In April 2020 it added a second limit: a message that has already been forwarded many times can only go to one chat at a time, and gets a double-arrow label. Both are still in force; they're in our table of WhatsApp limits.
The TSE went after bulk sending. Its 2019 propaganda resolution, 23.610, bans campaign messaging sent in bulk without the recipient's consent, or through tools outside what the app itself provides. For the 2020 municipal elections the court and WhatsApp set up a reporting channel for suspicious mass senders. It received 4,759 reports, and 1,004 accounts were banned, though WhatsApp said it had already banned most of them on its own.
In 2022 the stakes were a Lula-Bolsonaro rematch. WhatsApp signed an agreement with the TSE and held back the launch of Communities, its feature for running many groups under one roof, in Brazil until after the election. The company said that was its own decision, not a deal with the court. Bolsonaro attacked it publicly anyway.
That year the left fought back online much harder than in 2018, with Janones as one of its loudest voices. The TSE ordered posts taken down on both sides. Lula won with 50.9%.
It didn't end there. In the days before 8 January 2023, when Bolsonaro supporters stormed Congress, the presidential palace and the Supreme Court in BrasĂlia, calls to go to a "Festa da Selma", a code for the attack, circulated on WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook and TikTok. The networks built in 2018 hadn't gone anywhere.
2023 and 2024: Channels arrive
On 13 September 2023 WhatsApp launched Channels in Brazil, with 16 Brazilian media outlets as launch partners. A channel is a different kind of thing from a group. Only admins post. Followers can't see each other and can't reply, only react or vote in polls. There's no member limit. Notifications are off by default, so a channel sits in the Updates tab until you go and look. We've written a guide to using channels for political and social organizations.
For elections, the thing that matters most is that a channel is public. Anyone can find one in the app and read every post, with its reaction and forward counts, without even following it.
For the 2024 municipal elections the TSE added rules for AI. Resolution 23.732 requires campaign content made or altered with AI to say so, and bans deepfakes of candidates.
2026: the channel election
When the 2026 campaign started, the parties' own channels were still small. On 28 September, six days before the first round, PT was Brazil's most-followed party on WhatsApp with 36,413 followers. PL had 19,693. Most parties had no official channel at all.
The action was in channels run by people. After the first round, Janones's Exército do Lula went from 55,000 followers to more than 10 million, sending timed "missions" to push hashtags, share videos and search Google. On Flávio Bolsonaro's side, deputy Nikolas Ferreira's Tropa do Flávio reached about 2.1 million. Both channels were bigger than any party's. By 26 October PT's own channel had grown to 510,301 (you can follow every reading in our Brazil ranking), and it was still about a twentieth the size of Janones's.
The big difference from 2018 is that everyone could see what was happening. When Flávio's campaign took Exército do Lula to court, the TSE's disinformation office opened the channel's public page and wrote a 21-page report from what it found there: the missions, the timing, screenshots of the forward counters (344,000 on a single invite text). In 2018, nobody could have produced that report about a network of private groups in a single day.
Visibility has limits, though. The same report noted that messages had been deleted and edited, and that only Meta could reconstruct the full history. And forwarding still does the real work: the channel is where a post starts, and family groups are where it gets read. Tropa do Flávio's debate-night order, "manda pra todos os grupos e listas" (send it to all your groups and lists), would have made sense in 2018.
The court changed the rules mid-campaign. On 16 October the TSE decided that a WhatsApp channel counts as linked to a campaign if it meets any one of six criteria, such as campaign money, campaign staff or the link appearing on the campaign's official profiles. Linked channels have to be registered with the electoral court and can be switched off until they are. A proposal to switch off every political channel with more than 200,000 followers for the 48 hours before the runoff was left for after the election.
Flávio led the first round 47% to 45%. Lula won the runoff 51.79% to 48.21%, the first time a Brazilian first-round leader had lost the presidential runoff.
What changed, and what didn't
| Election | 2018 | 2022 | 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Main format | Private groups, paid mass messaging | Groups plus public profiles of campaigners | Public channels with millions of followers |
| Forwarding | Up to 20 chats at once | 5 chats, or 1 for "forwarded many times" | 5 chats, or 1 for "forwarded many times" |
| What the court could see | Almost nothing in real time | Reports through the WhatsApp reporting channel | Every live post, with its counters |
| Key rule | Ban on undeclared company money | Ban on bulk sending without consent (2019) | Channels linked to a campaign must be registered |
The format moved from hidden to public, and the law moved from asking who paid to asking who runs the channel. What didn't change is where politics ends up in Brazil: a forward in a group, from someone you trust, read on a phone where WhatsApp is always open.
What to watch next
The TSE left its debate on big political channels for after the election, so that comes next. Janones says Exército do Lula will keep going through Lula's fourth term, with new missions and a target of 12 or 13 million followers. That means Brazil now has a president who says he'll speak to his base through a channel run by someone outside government, and an electoral court that has only just written its first rules for channels.
Brazil's next elections are the municipal ones in 2028. We'll keep reading the parties' WhatsApp channels in the meantime, and the numbers stay in our open dataset.
