Images and Misinformation in Political Groups: Evidence from WhatsApp in India
By Kiran Garimella, Dean Eckles. 2020
116 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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 13% of shared images are known misinformation and most fall into three types of images. Machine learning methods can be used to predict whether a viral image is misinformation, but are brittle to shifts in content over time.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Sociology and Political Science
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In Artificial Intelligence
In Sociology and Political Science
- David G. Rand
- Gordon Pennycook
- Jabin Binnendyk
- Christie Newton
- Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
- Nicholas C. Dias
- J. Pierre
- S. Michael Gaddis
Citations in the corpus
- Beyond (Mis)Representation: Visuals in COVID-19 Misinformation (2020, background): “2020), as does misinformation more generally (Garimella and Eckles 2020). Amid a wider recognition that we need to take visual elements of news content seriously (see, e.g., Grabe and Bucy 2009; Schill 2012), we should also recognize that visuals play important roles within misinformation. Further r”
- A Practical Guide to Doing Behavioral Research on Fake News and Misinformation (2020, background): “There are, of course, many other sources of misinformation (both on social media and otherwise), such as WhatsApp (Garimella & Eckles, 2020; Machado et al., 2019), TikTok (Basch et al., 2021), YouTube (Donzelli et al., 2018; Hussein et al., 2020), Reddit (Achimescu & Chachev, 2021), and Parler (Bain”