Images and Misinformation in Political Groups: Evidence from WhatsApp in India
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Abstract (arXiv)
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.
Key facts. Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 19 May 2020.
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Citing papers per year: 2021: 5; 2022: 1; 2023: 1; 2024: 2; 2025: 2.
11 papers.
- 2023Multimodal Automated Fact-Checking: A Surveycited by 51
- 2021A Survey on Multimodal Disinformation Detectioncited by 47
- 2021Claim Matching Beyond English to Scale Global Fact-Checkingcited by 42
- 2022Human Detection of Political Speech Deepfakes across Transcripts, Audio, and Videocited by 16
- 2021"Short is the Road that Leads from Fear to Hate": Fear Speech in Indian WhatsApp Groupscited by 13
- 2024AI-Generated Faces in the Real World: A Large-Scale Case Study of Twitter Profile Imagescited by 10
- 2021Challenges and Considerations with Code-Mixed NLP for Multilingual Societiescited by 4
- 2021Tiplines to Combat Misinformation on Encrypted Platforms: A Case Study of the 2019 Indian Election on WhatsAppcited by 2
- 2024PIXELMOD: Improving Soft Moderation of Visual Misleading Information on Twittercited by 0
- 2025Dataset of News Articles with Provenance Metadata for Media Relevance Assessmentcited by 0
- 2025WhatsApp Tiplines and Multilingual Claims in the 2021 Indian Assembly Electionscited by 0
- 2025WhatsApp Tiplines and Multilingual Claims in the 2021 Indian Assembly Elections22 Jul 2025
- 2025Dataset of News Articles with Provenance Metadata for Media Relevance Assessment11 Jun 2025
- 2024PIXELMOD: Improving Soft Moderation of Visual Misleading Information on Twitter30 Jul 2024
- 2024AI-Generated Faces in the Real World: A Large-Scale Case Study of Twitter Profile Images22 Apr 2024
- 2023Multimodal Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey22 May 2023
- 2022Human Detection of Political Speech Deepfakes across Transcripts, Audio, and Video25 Feb 2022
- 2021Challenges and Considerations with Code-Mixed NLP for Multilingual Societies15 Jun 2021
- 2021Tiplines to Combat Misinformation on Encrypted Platforms: A Case Study of the 2019 Indian Election on WhatsApp8 Jun 2021
- 2021Claim Matching Beyond English to Scale Global Fact-Checking1 Jun 2021
- 2021A Survey on Multimodal Disinformation Detection13 Mar 2021
- 2021"Short is the Road that Leads from Fear to Hate": Fear Speech in Indian WhatsApp Groups7 Feb 2021