SAO PAULO — The WhatsApp messaging service said Friday that it has sent “cease and desist” letters to stop companies from sending bulk messages related to Brazil’s election, after a report that businessmen were bankrolling a campaign to spread fake news in support of leading far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro.
The service also banned those companies’ accounts after a report in the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper on Thursday that said a blast messaging campaign was planned for the week before the Oct. 28 runoff.
Bolsonaro’s rival, Fernando Haddad, said that, if true, the scheme would amount to illegal campaign practices and asked Brazil’s electoral court to investigate. Haddad, who became the candidate for the left-leaning Workers’ Party after former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was banned because of a corruption conviction, alleged that hundreds of thousands of fake messages were already sent out in support of Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro has said any support he received from businessmen was voluntary and his Social and Liberal Party said all donations they have received were legal.
WhatsApp said in a statement that it was taking the allegation seriously. It declined to name the companies that it sent the letters to, but the Folha report identified marketing companies it said allegedly received money to do the blast messaging. None of the companies mentioned immediately responded to requests to confirm they had received the “cease and desist” letters.
WhatsApp is immensely popular in Brazil, which is home to nearly one in 10 users worldwide, but it has come under scrutiny during this election as concerns grow about whether false or manipulated messages are influencing voters. While fake news is a concern on many social media platforms, like Twitter and Facebook, WhatsApp is more difficult to police because users exchange information directly and rumors there can gain added credibility since they’re shared privately by friends.
Since August, when the election campaign officially got under way in Brazil, WhatsApp said it had banned hundreds of thousands of accounts using spam-detection technology to identify those that “engage in abnormal behavior.”
The company said Friday that the account of Bolsonaro’s son, Flavio, was blocked a few days earlier for spamming users. Flavio Bolsonaro, who is a senator-elect for Rio de Janeiro, tweeted Friday that his account was banned but hours later said it had been unblocked. The company could not immediately confirm that the account had been reinstated.
“The persecution knows no limits!” Flavio Bolsonaro tweeted Friday when he initially said his account had been blocked. Jair Bolsonaro’s campaign has frequently alleged that the mainstream media and others are working against the front-runner’s candidacy.
WhatsApp noted that an account for former President Dilma Rousseff, who is from the rival Workers’ Party and ran for senator in this election and lost, was also blocked during her campaign.
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Associated Press writer Stan Lehman contributed to this report.
