Abstract:

In this talk, I will present our on-going research on WhatsApp. I will first talk about the tools we built to collect large amounts of WhatsApp data from political groups in India. Next, I will discuss how such data could be useful for journalists, fact checking organizations and researchers, to study various problems, including misinformation and hate. I will present three case studies making use of this data: (i) studying image-based misinformation, showcasing novel ways images are being used to spread false information, (ii) How a closed messaging application is being used for cross-platform coordination and manipulation of Twitter trends, and (iii) the prevalence of a special form of hate speech which we call fear speech — speech inducing fear about a certain group (muslims in our case). Finally, I will conclude with potential solutions to tackle these problems and how end to end encryption on WhatsApp makes it challenging to address them. Overall, my research provides a study of a popular yet completely under studied platform like WhatsApp and showcases how an interdisciplinary approach is required to develop solutions for issues on such platforms.

Bio:

Kiran Garimella is the Michael Hammer postdoc at the Institute for Data, Systems and Society at MIT. Before joining MIT, he was a postdoc at EPFL, Switzerland. His research focuses on using digital data for social good, including areas like polarization, misinformation and human migration. His work on studying and mitigating polarization on social media won the best student paper awards at WSDM 2017 and WebScience 2017. Kiran received his PhD in computer science at Aalto University, Finland, and Masters & Bachelors from IIIT Hyderabad, India. Prior to his PhD, he worked as a Research Engineer at Yahoo Research, Barcelona, and QCRI, Doha.

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