On January 31, 2025, Kiran Garimella will give a talk about misinformation on WhatsApp.

Abstract

In this talk, I will present a study looking at the prevalence of misinformation, political propaganda and hate speech on WhatsApp. Using a large WhatsApp data donation program in India and Brazil covering thousands of users, we systematically analyze private group messages to understand content prevalence, virality, and user profiles in problematic content spread. Our analysis from data in India showed a high prevalence of political content, with significant misinformation and hate speech against Muslims. This misinformation was notably prevalent in caste-based groups and had been previously debunked by fact-checkers, indicating a failure of fact-checks to reach these groups. This research is the first quantitative and representative analysis of everyday WhatsApp use and highlights challenges with end-to-end encrypted platforms. It provides a baseline for developing moderation policies to combat misinformation and promote responsible use of encrypted communication channels. The study also develops novel data donation methods and tools to collect representative samples from hard to study platforms. These approaches can be scaled to other platforms to enable data collection in the post API age.

About the Speaker

Kiran Garimella is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers university. Prior to that, he was the Michael Hammer Post-doc at the Institute for Data, Society and Systems at MIT. Prior to that he spent a year working with Prof. Robert West in the Data science lab at EPFL. H finished his PhD at Aalto University, Helsinki, under the supervision of Prof. Aris Gionis. My PhD thesis was on identifying and countering online polarization using algorithmic techniques. His broad research interests include Social Computing, Computational Social Science, Graphs, Data Mining, and Machine Learning.