The Knight Foundation has awarded funding to Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science Kiran Garimella for the project, “A System for Fact-Checking WhatsApp Content from Diaspora Communities.”
The project has three main goals: to develop a web-based monitoring system tailored towards the needs of Latinx and South Asian diaspora communities in the U.S., specifically, in Florida, Texas, and North Carolina; and with this tool, to help fact-check content from these communities on WhatsApp; and to understand the dis-, and misinformation ecosystem on WhatsApp more broadly which will deliver lessons that can be applied for developing efficient fact-checking solutions for all content on encrypted messaging apps.
The infrastructure they will develop for this project will be easily re-used for other types of data monitoring (e.g., Facebook, Signal, or Telegram) making this research particularly valuable, Garimella said.
As the principal investigator, Garimella will work with a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin. “With this grant,” Garimella said, “we will develop a web dashboard for grouping and monitoring hundreds of WhatsApp groups to get a bird’s eye view of content being consumed in these communities. Stakeholders (community leaders, journalists, and fact-checkers) will be provided access to the dashboard and can engage in fact-checking viral content through the dashboard. Built-in and customizable push mechanisms will publish the fact-checked result back to the groups where the potential misinformation was originally received. Finally, all collected data will be analyzed to develop technical solutions to tackle misinformation, specifically on encrypted chat apps.”
They chose these communities to research, Garimella said, primarily because they are vulnerable to disinformation. In addition, he said, these groups are important in a democratic sense due to increased voter turnout.
This project is a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, Garimella said. “The University of Texas researchers are conducting qualitative research building upon their connections with many of the migrant communities and community leaders to help them understand how communities receive misinformation. On the Rutgers side, my team will be building quantitative, data-driven metrics, including a detailed analysis of images, videos, and messages in different languages, for understanding how much misinformation the people in these communities are receiving.”
Garimella said the monitoring tool he will develop for this project will be similar to a previous version he created for India and Brazil which was used by over 100 journalists/fact-checkers.
They chose these communities to research, Garimella said, primarily because they are vulnerable to disinformation. In addition, he said, these groups are important in a democratic sense due to increased voter turnout.
The infrastructure they will develop for this project will be easily re-used for other types of data monitoring (e.g., Facebook, Signal, or Telegram) making this research particularly valuable, Garimella said.
More information about the Library and Information Science Department at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information is on the website.
In the Media: The Knight Foundation: “Nine universities and nonprofits awarded more than $1.2 million from Knight Foundation to combat disinformation in communities of color”
