This event is part of the webinar series organized by Anja Neundorf and Aykut Ozturk. This webinar series aims to provide practical training on how to use social media as a research tool, as well as reveal various data sources that are available to social media researchers.

Speaker: Kiran Garimella (University of Glasgow)

In this talk, I will present a tool called WhatsApp Explorer that we developed to collect data from WhatsApp. The tool enables users to donate WhatsApp group data in a legal, ethical and practical way. I will discuss how we deployed the tool in India and Brazil covering thousands of users, to 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. 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. I will also discuss the 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.

 
Register through this link!

First published: 1 January 2025

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Professor Anja Neundorf

Dr Aykut Ozturk

Webinar Series