Talk by Kiran Garimella on Misinformation on WhatsApp

On January 31, 2025, 13:15-14:15, we are happy to host a talk by Kiran Garimella on misinformation on WhatsApp. The talk will take place in Favoritenstraße 9-11, 1040 Wien, in Seminarraum Zemanek (Hörsaal 3). You are most welcome to join us.

Title: Misinformation on WhatsApp - insights from a large data donation program

Speaker: Kiran Garimella, Rutgers

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: Kiran is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University. Prior to that, he was the Michael Hammer Post-doc at MIT a post-doc with Prof. Robert West at EPFL. He finished his PhD at Aalto University, Helsinki, under the supervision of Prof. Aris Gionis. Kiran has received the Adamic-Glance Distinguished Young Researcher Award 2024, a best paper award at ICWSM 2021 and best student paper awards at WebScience 2017 and WSDM 2017, among many other accolades. His current research is focused on building innovative, opt-in, privacy preserving data-collection tools for platforms like WhatsApp, with the goal of developing interventions to stop/slow the spread of misinformation.