Related papers: Global Patterns of Viral Content on WhatsApp
WhatsApp emerged as a major communication platform in many countries in the recent years. Despite offering only one-to-one and small group conversations, WhatsApp has been shown to enable the formation of a rich underlying network, crossing…
WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app in the world. The closed nature of the app, in addition to the ease of transferring multimedia and sharing information to large-scale groups make WhatsApp unique among other platforms, where an…
An important political and social phenomena discussed in several countries, like India and Brazil, is the use of WhatsApp to spread false or misleading content. However, little is known about the information dissemination process in…
WhatsApp is a key medium for the spread of news and rumors, often shared as images. We study a large collection of politically-oriented WhatsApp groups in India, focusing on the period leading up to the 2019 Indian national elections. By…
WhatsApp is, as of 2018, a significant component of the global information and communication infrastructure, especially in developing countries. However, probably due to its strong end-to-end encryption, WhatsApp became an attractive place…
WhatsApp was alleged to be widely used to spread misinformation and propaganda during elections in Brazil and India. Due to the private encrypted nature of the messages on WhatsApp, it is hard to track the dissemination of misinformation at…
WhatsApp, a platform with more than two billion global users, plays a crucial role in digital communication, but also serves as a vector for harmful content such as misinformation, hate speech, and political propaganda. This study examines…
Recently, messaging applications, such as WhatsApp, have been reportedly abused by misinformation campaigns, especially in Brazil and India. A notable form of abuse in WhatsApp relies on several manipulated images and memes containing all…
Fake news and misinformation are one of the most significant challenges brought about by advances in communication technologies. We chose to research the spread of fake news in Pakistan because of some unfortunate incidents that took place…
The worldwide spread of COVID-19 has prompted extensive online discussions, creating an `infodemic' on social media platforms such as WhatsApp and Twitter. However, the information shared on these platforms is prone to be unreliable and/or…
WhatsApp is the largest social media platform in the Global South and is a virulent force in global misinformation and political propaganda. Due to end-to-end encryption WhatsApp can barely review any content and mostly rely on volunteer…
WhatsApp Messenger is one of the most popular channels for spreading information with a current reach of more than 180 countries and 2 billion people. Its widespread usage has made it one of the most popular media for information…
There is currently no easy way to fact-check content on WhatsApp and other end-to-end encrypted platforms at scale. In this paper, we analyze the usefulness of a crowd-sourced "tipline" through which users can submit content ("tips") that…
By early March 2020, five million Venezuelans had fled their home country after its complete economic and institutional collapse, and over 1.6 million have migrated to Colombia. Migrants struggle to start their lives over in Colombia,…
WhatsApp is a popular messaging app used by over a billion users around the globe. Due to this popularity, understanding misbehavior on WhatsApp is an important issue. The sending of unwanted junk messages by unknown contacts via WhatsApp…
Internet social networks have become a ubiquitous application allowing people to easily share text, pictures, and audio and video files. Popular networks include WhatsApp, Facebook, Reddit and LinkedIn. We present an extensive study of the…
Multiple official languages within a country along with languages common with other countries demand content consistency in both shared and unshared languages during information sharing. However, inconsistency due to conflict in content…
We present a thorough characterization of what we believe to be the first significant analysis of the behavior of groups in WhatsApp in the scientific literature. Our characterization of over 270,000 messages and about 7,000 users spanning…
WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app in the world. Due to its popularity, WhatsApp has become a powerful and cheap tool for political campaigning being widely used during the 2019 Indian general election, where it was used to connect…
WhatsApp groups have become a hotbed for the propagation of harmful content including misinformation, hate speech, polarizing content, and rumors, especially in Global South countries. Given the platform's end-to-end encryption, moderation…