The development of this study is part of a broader research carried out by the Ideograma-UPF Chair of Political Communication and Democracy entitled: "Analysis of the credibility of political information in the digital environment (Facebook, WhatsApp, digital press and television)" and carried out by researchers Carles Pont Reinald Besalú, Edgar Rovira, Santiago Castelo and Metzeri Sánchez.

In the last ten years the digital information ecosystem has changed our communicative habits in an accelerated way. This innovation has transformed personal communications in a dizzying way, but the question is whether the acquisition and credibility we give to public and political information has also changed. The WhatsApp platform appeared in the digital environment in 2010 as a free instant messaging service for smartphones and, since that year, the services it provides have varied without losing sight of its main objective: to facilitate direct communication between individuals through their smartphones.

The main objectives of the study "The use of WhatsApp as a political information tool" have been:

1. To identify the usefulness that Spanish citizens give to the WhatsApp platform.
2. To know the practices of the Spaniards before the political information received in the platform.
3. Analyze if the political information is shared, or not, in the application groups and the level of credibility that the Spaniards give it.

And for the development of this study, the following hypotheses were put forward:

1. WhatsApp is a platform used by citizens to receive, inform and share political news.
2. In WhatsApp there is a greater propensity for citizens to share information accompanied by video or photography.
3. Citizens give low or very low credibility to the news they receive through WhatsApp.
4. Citizens tend to comment on political news through WhatsApp.

The research uses a quantitative methodology focused on the design of a representative survey for the whole of Spain carried out by the demoscopy company YouGov from the design of the questions of the researchers of the study. For the collection of information a Likert scale of 1 - 5 was used in which 1 corresponds to the lowest indicator of measurement (Never and No credibility according to the case); and 5 to the highest indicator (Very often, Total credibility).

For more details and research results you can download here.