Structural Dynamics of Harmful Content Dissemination on WhatsApp

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how harmful content spreads on WhatsApp, revealing that such messages tend to propagate more extensively and are primarily shared via videos and images, emphasizing the importance of structural factors in their dissemination.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of harmful content dissemination patterns on WhatsApp, highlighting the structural characteristics influencing spread.

Findings

Harmful messages have greater dissemination depth and breadth.

Videos and images are the main modes of harmful content sharing.

Structural characteristics significantly influence harmful content spread.

Abstract

WhatsApp, a platform with more than two billion global users, plays a crucial role in digital communication, but also serves as a vector for harmful content such as misinformation, hate speech, and political propaganda. This study examines the dynamics of harmful message dissemination in WhatsApp groups, with a focus on their structural characteristics. Using a comprehensive data set of more than 5.1 million messages, including text, images, and videos, collected from approximately 6,000 groups in India, we reconstruct message propagation cascades to analyze dissemination patterns. Our findings reveal that harmful messages consistently achieve greater depth and breadth of dissemination compared to messages without harmful annotations, with videos and images emerging as the primary modes of dissemination. These results suggest a distinctive pattern of dissemination of harmful content. However, our analysis indicates that modality alone cannot fully account for the structural differences in propagation.The findings highlight the critical role of structural characteristics in the spread of these harmful messages, suggesting that strategies targeting structural characteristics of re-sharing could be crucial in managing the dissemination of such content on private messaging platforms.