The rise of Global South WhatsAppers

Supervisor/s: João Arriscado Nunes and Nenad Stojanovic

Doctoral Programme: Democracy in the Twenty-first Century

Chat apps are more than messaging services for "hanging out" with like-minded people: they have gradually become a key platform for social and political mobilization, particularly in the Global South countries. They create new possibilities of communication practices with impact on the political sphere, everyday life, and elections. This thesis investigates how WhatsApp as a platform has been appropriated by local communities in Florianópolis, the capital city of the state of Santa Catarina, Brazil. Aware of the importance of highlighting the Global South(s) perspectives beyond Western Europe and North America, I focus on two case studies: #United Against the Coup, and #Campeche and South of the Island Popular Struggle Committee. Embedded in the literature of digital sociology, digital activism and digital ethics, the theoretical framework that guides the course of this work relies also on the timely book of Johns et al. (2024) entitled WhatsApp: From a one-to-one Messaging App to a Global Communication Platform. The triangulation of qualitative methods is composed of three main axes: i) digital ethnography; ii) chat scraping of selected content; iii) 45 semi-structured, face-to-face interviews. The research analysis is structured via five communicative repertoires: information-sharing; interpersonal trust, on-the-ground mobilization, networks of solidarity and pipeline. The benefits are two main achievements: to develop an analytical framework of Global South WhatsAppers aimed at gauging the pro-democracy potential of chat applications, which has been rarely done so far in the digital sociology field, and a valuable impact on local activism which experiments emerging models of giving voice to marginalized groups on and with WhatsApp. Based upon these findings, I argue that initiatives organized by WhatsAppers are built around problems that are initially experienced and contextualized in the local neighborhoods, but which, from time to time, relate to struggles and more general mobilizations connected with political turbulence at the national level. This thesis should be of particular interest to chat app researchers who are exploring WhatsApp-mediated activism through digital ethnography, as well as to local neighborhoods who are building digital strategies for political organizing mainly on and with chat apps.