TSE's WhatsApp Fact-Check Chatbot — Brazil's Electoral Court Routes Voters to Partner Fact-Checks, with No Published Impact Evaluation

The Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (TSE), Brazil's electoral court, operates an official WhatsApp chatbot that lets voters check suspected disinformation. Users type search terms or send links; the system searches a database of content already verified by four partner fact-checking organisations — Agência Lupa, Aos Fatos, Projeto Comprova and Estadão Verifica. Unverified claims are forwarded to the checkers for review.
The 2022 version was built with Meedan (a non-profit tipline software provider) and Infobip (a WhatsApp service provider) under the "Confirma 2022" collaboration. Reporting at the time put the bot at over 530,000 subscribers by September 2022. Meedan reports that its work with partners in Brazil produced more than 64,000 conversations and more than 15,000 distributed fact-checks across five tiplines, and describes the TSE bot as used by millions of Brazilians monthly; the latter is a partner claim that this entry could not verify against TSE data.
Limits are explicit. The bot depends entirely on existing fact-checks, so new claims wait for manual verification by the partner agencies. No source reviewed here evaluates whether users believe or share less false content after using it, so the evidence is of reach and operation rather than of outcomes. Academic work on the 2022 election's WhatsApp, Twitter and Kwai claims used tipline data from the same ecosystem. Since 2024 the TSE has embedded disinformation work in a permanent programme with an integrated centre (CIEDDE); those later results were not independently verified here.

Read the full analysis: https://meedan.com/post/meedan-launches-collaborative-effort-to-address-misinformation-on-whatsapp-during-brazils-presidential-election