A deep dive into COVID-19-related messages on WhatsApp in Pakistan
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13278_2021_833_ReferencePDF.pdf
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Author(s)
Javed, R. Tallal
Usama, Muhammad
Iqbal, Waleed
Qadir, Junaid
Tyson, Gareth
Castro, Ignacio
Garimella, Kiran
Date Issued
November 2021
Journal
Social Network Analysis and Mining
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Social Network Analysis and Mining. 2021 Nov 15;12(1):5
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Abstract
The spread of COVID-19 and the lockdowns that followed led to an increase in activity on online social networks. This has resulted in users sharing unfiltered and unreliable information on social networks like WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, etc. In this work, we give an extended overview of how Pakistan’s population used public WhatsApp groups for sharing information related to the pandemic. Our work is based on a major effort to annotate thousands of text and image-based messages. We explore how information propagates across WhatsApp and the user behavior around it. Specifically, we look at political polarization and its impact on how users from different political parties shared COVID-19-related content. We also try to understand information dissemination across different social networks—Twitter and WhatsApp—in Pakistan and find that there is no significant bot involvement in spreading misinformation about the pandemic.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Data, Systems, and Society
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-021-00833-0
