Us vs. Them: A Dataset of Political Othering in Brazilian WhatsApp Discourse

Dataset Description

This dataset contains messages identified as instances of political othering in Brazilian public WhatsApp groups. It was developed as part of the study “Us vs. Them: A Dataset of Political Othering in Brazilian WhatsApp Discourse”.

The dataset was constructed using a combination of manual annotation and large language model-assisted labeling with systematic human validation. Each record includes the anonymized message text and the corresponding annotation fields used in the study. Personally identifiable information and other potentially sensitive information were removed or anonymized before release.

Due to the sensitive nature of the data, the dataset files are not publicly available for download. Access may be granted to researchers upon reasonable request. Requests should include the applicant’s institutional affiliation, the purpose of the research, the intended use of the data, and a commitment not to attempt to identify users or redistribute the dataset. 

Researchers using this dataset must cite the associated paper:

Daniel Kansaon et al. “Us vs. Them: A Dataset of Political Othering in Brazilian WhatsApp Discourse.” In: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT ’26), 2026.

By requesting access, users agree to use the dataset exclusively for academic and non-commercial research, to comply with applicable ethical and data-protection requirements, and not to redistribute the data or publish identifiable message content.