WhatsApp monitor: A fact-checking system for WhatsApp

Abstract

WhatsApp is the most popular communication application in many developing countries such as Brazil, India, and Mexico, where many people use it as an interface to the web. Due to its encrypted and peer-to-peer nature feature, it is hard for researchers to study which content people share through WhatsApp at scale. In this demo paper, we propose WhatsApp Monitor (http://www.whatsapp-monitor.dcc.ufmg.br/), a web-based system that helps researchers and journalists explore the nature of content shared on WhatsApp public groups from two different contexts: Brazil and India. Our tool monitors multiple content categories such as images, videos, audio, and textual messages posted on a set of WhatsApp groups and displays the most shared content per day. Our tool has been used for monitoring content during the 2018 Brazilian general election and was one of the major sources for estimating the spread of misinformation and helping fact-checking efforts.