Speaker

Kiran Garimella

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 initial analysis from data in Uttar Pradesh, 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 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.

Bio

Kiran Garimella is an assistant professor in the school of communication and information at Rutgers University. Prior to joining Rutgers, Dr. Garimella was the Michael Hammer postdoc at the Institute for Data, Systems and Society at MIT, and a postdoc at EPFL, Switzerland. His research deals with using large-scale data to tackle societal issues such as misinformation, political polarization, or hate speech. His work on studying and mitigating polarization on social media won the best paper awards at top computer science conferences. Kiran received his Ph.D. in computer science at Aalto University, Finland, and Masters & Bachelors from IIIT Hyderabad, India. Prior to his Ph.D., he worked as a Research Engineer at Yahoo Research, Barcelona, and QCRI, Doha.