Main Topics for Brazilian WhatsApp groups

6.2. Comparing Different Sources for WhatsApp Public Groups on Web 110 show a dynamic and ephemeral nature of public groups, in which new groups are created and others become inaccessible in a short period of time.

6.2. Comparing Different Sources for WhatsApp Public Groups on Web 111 WhatsApp groups dedicated to other platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and Instagram. A large part of them are about how to gain followers and likes on these networks. Although it is a practice that does not comply with the rules of the platforms (CASSITA, 2019), it is common for users to join together in the search for followers and likes on other networks. We even noticed that some of these groups offer paid and automated services for selling likes and followers.

Other information available is the number of views of each group in the repository

“Grupos de Zap”. Despite the limit of 256 members on WhatsApp, a group can be viewed numerous times on the site, which gives us a sense of how attractive a category is to users.

In Figure6.18, we have a boxplot with the distribution of views by category. It is noted, a large number of views in all categories, which suggests that the repositories not only store, but that, in fact, attract a lot of users who search for those groups. These results show that groups are objects of interest for many users, and that these repositories are fundamental tools for them to be found within the universe of public groups existing in this ecosystem.

It is important to note that the categories with the most views (i.e., considering the median of the distribution) do not necessarily correspond to those with the highest number of groups. While Friendship, the category with the most groups, has an average of around 50 views, others have an average of over 200 views, such as Romance, Stickers, Cities and Cars. Hence, we can see some differences regarding what kind of content attracts more attention from users wanting to join the groups and what authors want to create more groups.

Moreover, Education, Stickers, Money, and Employment categories have groups with particularly high number of views, some individual groups with more than 10

thou-Figure 6.18: Distribution of number of visualization by each group topic.

Memes & Jokes

Fandoms Religion Music Events Jobs Group Links

Tv Cars Gym

Social Networks

Others News Cities Recipes Games Cartoons SportsFriendship Nerds

Movies & Series Love Money

Weight Loss  Health & BeautyStatus Message

Politics EducationStickers

Category

0 1 10 100 1.000 10.000 100.000

#Visualizations per Group

Source: The Author.

6.2. Comparing Different Sources for WhatsApp Public Groups on Web 112 sand views within the repository. The Jobs category refers to groups offering and seeking work opportunities and also selling products. The Education section offers courses and online classes. The large number of views of these two categories reveals an important use of WhatsApp, which goes beyond entertainment with a simple chat and discussion space.

Users also utilize the public groups for working and learning purposes, making them also a tool of social services and real-world implications. Even though we don’t have as many groups, these categories are highly viewed, which shows the great interest of users in these topics on WhatsApp.

Sticker groups on WhatsApp are also extremely common. Since users can create their own stickers on chats, this space is often used to share creations of popular characters or memes on the internet. Even though there are not many groups, the Stickers’ category is one of the most popular among the groups, showing a very specific behavior based on a feature of WhatsApp itself.

Furthermore, we look at the Politics and Health categories within the online repos-itories, as these topics are the focus of several studies on public WhatsApp groups. In health, despite there are more than a thousand groups, it has a low average number of views. Political groups represent a small portion when compared to the total universe of groups in the database. However, there are still a fair amount of groups dedicated to the subject, with about700 groups, in addition to a significant number of views (i.e., median close to 100). Given the prominence that political messages have in society, we see that these topics manage to generate a large volume of content on WhatsApp, even with a small number of groups, deserving special attention.

After that, we take our attention to the groups found on the social networks. When sharing a group on social media, the user usually also provides some context information that helps describe what the group is about. With that in mind, even though not having the actual label for those groups, these messages help us to have a more general view of the content of the groups posted on Twitter and Facebook. Here, we repeat some analysis regarding groups discovered for this specific dataset of Brazilian public groups, focusing in differentiating each source of groups. First, we observed the cloud of terms from messages containing WhatsApp groups (Figure6.19). With the cloud of terms, it is already possible to identify some relevant differences between the platforms: while Twitter highlights some terms with sexual connotations, on Facebook it is possible to see more religious words.

On Twitter, pornography-related terms are much more frequent, with terms like (e.g., “whore”, “porn”, “xvideos”), while on Facebook (Fig. 6.19(b)), this type of content is not allowed by the Terms of Service. This not only shows that WhatsApp has a large amount of adult content groups (which is hidden through the other data sources), it also points to Twitter as a relevant source of these types of groups.

It is noted that many messages analyzed use a metalinguistic language about the promotion of the groups by inviting people to join WhatsApp groups with words such as

6.2. Comparing Different Sources for WhatsApp Public Groups on Web 113 Figure 6.19: Word cloud of messages containing WhatsApp groups.

(a) Twitter (b) Facebook

Source: The Author.

“click”, “participate” and “access”, showing that these messages, in fact, aim to invite users to be members of their groups. In both figures, it is also possible to identify mentions of other social networks, such as Telegram, TikTok, Instagram. This demonstrates a strong relationship between the numerous popular social networks and WhatsApp groups, suggesting that users do not only advertise their WhatsApp groups, but probably also several profiles from other networks, with a large interplay between them.

We see the word “stickers” highlighted on Twitter, a category of groups that was also one of the most popular found in the analyses of online repositories, showing, again, that groups about stickers on WhatsApp are also very popular on social networks.

Finally, several terms were also found suggesting the existence of groups that pro-mote and sell content and/or services (e.g., “sales”, “pix”, “vacancies”, “pack” ). With this, we see that WhatsApp is a business tool for many users. In addition to a conver-sation application, it can be used to buy, sell and offer various products and services.

In view of the analyzed period, the presence of this category is quite interesting, since the COVID-19 pandemic led many companies and service providers to look for ways to undertake in the digital world, making WhatsApp become a popular channel of commu-nication. However, among these groups, there are many promoting schemes and frauds persuading users to join suggesting a worrying existence of spam, scams, phishing and other types of harmful and dangerous content within WhatsApp network, hidden from public audience and without any moderation.

6.2. Comparing Different Sources for WhatsApp Public Groups on Web 114