International instant messaging platform WhatsApp granted two Syracuse University faculty members $50,000 to research the spread of misinformation on the application.

School of Information Studies professor Jennifer Stromer-Galley and post-doctoralresearch associate Patricia Rossini are collaborating to study the spread of misinformation via WhatsApp, specifically during the 2018 Brazilian elections, Rossini said. She said they intend to use a third-party company to conduct surveys among a sample of the Brazilian population and understand why WhatsApp users shared political information during the election cycle.

“Part of what we are very interested in learning is to what extent people behave differently when engaging political activities in regular social media platforms, more public ones, like Facebook or Twitter and how they do that on WhatsApp,” Rossini said.

Although it’s not quite as popular in the United States, Rossini said WhatsApp is used by about 90 percent of Brazilian citizens. Brazil is one of WhatsApp’s largest markets, and some phone companies do not charge for data usage on the app, she added.

“It’s a cross platform, so it doesn’t matter whether you have an Android or an iPhone,” she said. “It’s basically the first app that was able to at (a) really large-scale promote peer-to-peer interaction through SMS text across platforms.”

The app allows for groups to be created with up to 256 members, Rossini said.

The private nature of direct messaging on WhatsApp makes it difficult to determine whether the information being sent, often by friends and family, is legitimate. This wide reach of the platform has made it a target for political campaigns and the spread of misinformation, she said.

It was discovered that automated bots were creating and sending spam to users during the 2018 Brazilian elections, Rossini added.

WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, released a bid for proposals to research the spread of misinformation within its interface over the summer. The proposal application said the company would consider topics from any social science or technological field.

WhatsApp received about 600 applications. Rossiniand Stromer-Galley’s proposal was among the 20 chosen to receive the grant.

Jennifer Grygiel, an assistant professor of communication at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, said social media apps like WhatsApp and Instagram are beginning to give grants to outside researchers because of pressure for transparency in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In March 2018, it was discovered that the data firm had obtained private user information from Facebook.

The role of social media in democratic elections takes on different forms depending on the country. Grygiel said WhatsApp has gained popularity overseas due to the cost of texting.

“WhatsApp feels like text but without the fees,” Grygiel said. “SMS is relatively cheap in the states, so it wasn’t a driving force from a product development standpoint.”

Rossini, who earned her doctorate at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, reached out to colleagues at the Federal University to collaborate on the research. Stromer-Galley, director of the Center for Computational and Data Sciences, did not respond to a request for comment.

The Syracuse researchers will begin their work in the coming weeks. Rossini said they hope to contribute to WhatsApp’s understanding of the ways that itsusers interact.

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Published on December 5, 2018 at 11:07 pm

Contact Ryan: rybaker@syr.edu