WhatsApp Tiplines and Multilingual Claims in the 2021 Indian Assembly Elections

TL;DR

This study analyzes the use of WhatsApp tiplines during the 2021 Indian elections, examining multilingual claims, user behavior, and fact-checking processes to improve misinformation mitigation strategies.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of multilingual claims, user interactions, and fact-checking timelines on WhatsApp during elections, highlighting cross-language claim similarities and organizational user separation.

Findings

Claims are similar across languages, with some users submitting in multiple languages.

Fact-checkers typically take a few days to verify and communicate claims.

Each fact-checking organization maintains a distinct user base, with no overlap.

Abstract

WhatsApp tiplines, first launched in 2019 to combat misinformation, enable users to interact with fact-checkers to verify misleading content. This study analyzes 580 unique claims (tips) from 451 users, covering both high-resource languages (English, Hindi) and a low-resource language (Telugu) during the 2021 Indian assembly elections using a mixed-method approach. We categorize the claims into three categories, election, COVID-19, and others, and observe variations across languages. We compare content similarity through frequent word analysis and clustering of neural sentence embeddings. We also investigate user overlap across languages and fact-checking organizations. We measure the average time required to debunk claims and inform tipline users. Results reveal similarities in claims across languages, with some users submitting tips in multiple languages to the same fact-checkers. Fact-checkers generally require a couple of days to debunk a new claim and share the results with users. Notably, no user submits claims to multiple fact-checking organizations, indicating that each organization maintains a unique audience. We provide practical recommendations for using tiplines during elections with ethical consideration of users' information.