This research presents the first comprehensive analysis of problematic content circulation on WhatsApp, focusing on private group messages during the national election in India. Through a large-scale data donation program, we obtained a representative sample of users from Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state with over 200 million inhabitants. This extensive dataset allowed us to examine the prevalence of misinformation, political propaganda, AI-generated content, and hate speech across thousands of users. Our findings reveal a significant presence of political content, with two concerning trends emerging: widespread circulation of previously debunked misinformation and targeted hate speech against Muslim communities. While AI-generated content was minimal, the persistence of debunked misinformation suggests serious limitations in the reach and effectiveness of fact-checking efforts within these private groups.
This study makes several key contributions. First, it provides unprecedented quantitative insights into everyday WhatsApp usage patterns and content sharing behaviors. Second, it highlights unique challenges in moderating end-to-end encrypted platforms. Third, it introduces innovative data donation methodologies and tools for collecting representative samples from traditionally inaccessible platforms. The implications of our research extend beyond WhatsApp, offering valuable insights for developing effective content moderation policies across encrypted communication channels. Our data collection approach can be adapted for studying other platforms, particularly crucial in an environment where API access is increasingly restricted.
Kiran Garimella is an assistant professor of library and information science at Rutgers. Prior to joining Rutgers, Garimella was the Michael Hammer postdoc at the Institute for Data, Systems and Society at MIT and a postdoc at EPFL, Switzerland. His research focuses on using digital data for social good, including areas like polarization, misinformation and human migration. His work on studying and mitigating polarization on social media won the best paper awards at top computer science conferences. Kiran received his Ph.D. in computer science at Aalto University, Finland, and Masters & Bachelors from IIIT Hyderabad, India. Prior to his Ph.D., he worked as a Research Engineer at Yahoo Research, Barcelona, and QCRI, Doha.
This panel brings together voices from policy and academia to explore the Digital Services Act (DSA) and its implications for research. Silvia Merisio from the European Commission’s DSA enforcement team will join leading scholars Dr. Krishna Gummadi and Dr. Oana Goga to discuss the challenges and opportunities the DSA presents for computational social science—and beyond. Moderated by Dr. Francesco Pierri, the conversation will address emerging questions around data access, platform accountability, and the evolving role of researchers in the digital public sphere.
Silvia Merisio is policy officer in the DSA team of the European Commission and she coordinates the
work on transparency and data access.
Dr. Oana Goga is an Inria Research Director part of the Inria CEDAR team at Laboratoire
d'Informatique
l'École Polytechnique.
Dr. Krishna Gummadi is a Scientific Director at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in
Germany.
Dr. Francesco Pierri is an Assistant Professor in the Data Science Lab within the Department of
Electronics,
Information and Bioengineering (DEIB) at Politecnico di Milano.
Algorithmic auditing is an approach to the study of search engines and social media platforms inherited from the social scientific study of discrimination, where, for example, the same application for housing is submitted, albeit with names that signal differing cultural or ethnic backgrounds. For the study of engines and platforms, it is much broader though discrimination (and by extension content moderation) remains one focal point. The contribution discusses the typical ways in which Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok are ‘audited’, including approaches to the study of self-dealing, platform performer privileging, personalisation, shadow banning, angertainment and others.
Richard Rogers is Professor of New Media and Digital Culture, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam and Director of the Digital Methods Initiative, Humanities Labs. He is author of Information Politics on the Web, Digital Methods (both MIT Press) as well as Doing Digital Methods (Sage). He is editor (with Sabine Niederer) of The Politics of Social Media Manipulation, The Propagation of Misinformation in Social Media: A Cross-platform Analysis and the forthcoming Content Moderation across Social Media Platforms (all Amsterdam University Press). Appearing in 2025 is Digital Methods: A Short Introduction (Polity) with Tommaso Venturini.
Every day our life is made easier by efficient measures and algorithms that quantify, search, and rank scientific information. Yet, these measures and algorithms have an issue: they are trained on citations, which are ingrained with human biases. Therefore the output is inherently biased too, creating inequalities, raising concerns of discrimination, even harming growth. In this talk, I focus on recent quantitative efforts in science studies to (1) uncover bias mechanisms in science, (2) use this knowledge about biases to uncover inequalities in the scientific enterprise, and (3) create fair metrics and algorithms.
Roberta Sinatra is a Full Professor in Data Science at the University of Copenhagen (KU), and holds visiting positions at IT University of Copenhagen (ITU), ISI Foundation (Turin, Italy), and Complexity Science Hub (Vienna, Austria). She co-founded the NEtwoRks, Data, and Society (NERDS) Research group at ITU, which she coordinated until 2022, and is a co-lead at the AI pioneer center in Copenhagen. Her research is at the forefront of network science, data science, and computational social science. Roberta did her BSc, MSc, and PhD in Physics at the University of Catania, Italy, and is an alumna of the Scuola Superiore di Catania. She was first a James McDonnell postdoctoral fellow, then a research faculty at the Center for Complex Network Research of Northeastern University (Boston MA, USA). Her research has been published in top- tier venues like Nature and Science, and has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, The Economist, The Guardian, The Washington Post, among other major media outlets. Her research has been awarded the Complex Systems Society Junior prize, the DPG Young Scientist Award for Socio and Econophysics, a Villum Young Investigator grant, and an ERC consolidator grant.
This presentation deals with the uncomfortable fact that making equity, diversity and inclusion work in international research projects is messy – but necessary. And due to cultural norms and behaviours, the two agendas don’t always go hand in hand. We often have good intentions, but don’t always have the skills to bring them to life. We will look at the challenges and then zoom in on a few tangible tools from research strategy, to proposal writing and managing your research project to take the disaster out of the title.
Jakob Feldtfos Christensen is the director of DIVERSIunity. DIVERSIunity partners with actors across the research and innovation ecosystem to turn diversity and inclusion into a strategic advantage. He also co-hosts “The Diversity in Research Podcast” with Lachlan Stephen-Smith. He’s currently writing “Strategic Diversity Leadership for Research Managers: A Practical Guide”, to be published with Emerald Publishing in 2026.
Access the complete collection of contributions from ICWSM 2025.
