Kiran Garimella

WhatsApp was alleged to have been widely used to spread misinformation and propaganda during the 2018 elections in Brazil and the 2019 elections in India. Due to the private encrypted nature of the messages on WhatsApp, it is hard to track the dissemination of misinformation at scale.

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 labeling samples of random and popular images, we find that around 10% of shared images are known misinformation and most fall into three types of images.