Garimella and Tyson ( 2018) were the first to provide tools for analyzing public WhatsApp groups and collecting data at scale. 2019) (two of the largest democracies) show that one in six users are part of a political group on WhatsApp. Surveys performed in Brazil and India (Lokniti 2018 Newman et al. Due to the popularity of WhatsApp in certain regions, political parties have been actively using WhatsApp groups to reach the masses (Goel 2018). It is a documented fact that WhatsApp is being actively used for the dissemination of misinformation (Boadle 2018 Perrigo 2019). As a result, not a lot of work has been done to analyze its content and user interactions. WhatsApp is a closed network, without any official access for analyzing its content. The WhatsApp messaging service is the most actively used online social network in the world. Similarly, many researchers have conducted independent studies in line with those mentioned earlier (Zhang and Ghorbani 2020 Shu et al. ( 2019) where they gave detailed insights on how users interact with political content. A study on Instagram was conducted by Trevisan et al. 2019), the authors provide analysis on social media users and their interactions with controversial topics and content. In other similar works (Zollo and Quattrociocchi 2018 Cinelli et al. Their analysis relied on a graph of users based on the content they share. ( 2020) performed an analysis of Twitter to understand different types of misinformation. ( 2019) performed a systematic literature review to understand different methodologies for detecting misinformation in online social networks. They can be divided into two major approaches: content-based and propagation-based. There are various methods for detecting misinformation. They characterize the interactions of Twitter Republican and Democratic users with the Russian trolls. ( 2019) used Twitter to understand the effects the Russian Internet Research Agency might have had on American Twitter users. ( 2019) analyzed Twitter to understand the extent of political manipulation present during this period. For example, during the 2016 elections, social media were used extensively to manipulate social media users to sway their political inclinations. 2018 Iosifidis and Nicoli 2020 Bovet and Makse 2019). As a result, there have been many papers attempting to understand the impact social media has, the amount of misinformation present on it and the amount of exposure users have to this information (David et al. However, the events of the US presidential election have since triggered a flurry of work on this topic. Many studies have been conducted that gave a special focus to rumors and misinformation prior to the events of the 2016 US presidential elections (Starbird et al. In this extended version, in addition to looking at the type of messages being disseminated across COVID-19 in Pakistani WhatsApp groups, we also try to understand the impact that political affiliation has on a group’s overall sentiment related to COVID-19 and the types of messages being propagated. This work is an extended version of our earlier preliminary analysis of COVID-19-related messages being disseminated across public WhatsApp groups by Pakistani users (Javed et al. As a result, the moderation abilities on WhatsApp are very scant. Group admins cannot even do the simple moderation task of deleting a user’s post. Admins have very few tools at hand: either restrict who can post content or remove certain users from the group. The content of a group is only moderated by the groups’ administrators. These problems are exacerbated by the fact that content moderation in WhatsApp is rather limited. 2021) revealed the spread of hate speech and Islamophobia on WhatsApp. 2019a) revealed how WhatsApp can be an effective tool for the spread of disinformation. ![]() A study on Brazil’s WhatsApp users (Resende et al. Similarly, WhatsApp is also used for the propagation of antisocial behavior. Due to its end-to-end encryption, it is becoming a medium of choice for anti-government movements, sharing of radical ideas, and gang operations (UK says WhatsApp 2017). This makes WhatsApp a very important medium for analysis, as it is a major tool for opinion formation and social exchange. Apart from having a huge user base, it also has the most active users at a time, out of all the social networks (Two Billion Users 2020). This has created a closed social network of more than 1.5 billion users. Out of all these services and apps, WhatsApp is the most popular and widely used medium of communication. This has led to sharing ideas, getting exposed to different ideologies, and absorbing information at an unprecedented pace. ![]() ![]() Applications like Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp are enabling millions of users to connect and interact.
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