WhatsApp Messenger is one of the most popular channels for spreading information with a current reach of more than 180 countries and 2 billion people. Its widespread usage has made it one of the most popular media for information propagation among the masses during any socially engaging event. In the recent past, several countries have witnessed its effectiveness and influence in political and social campaigns. We observe a high surge in information and propaganda flow during election campaigning. In this paper, we explore a high-quality large-scale user-generated dataset curated from WhatsApp comprising of 281 groups, 31,078 unique users, and 223,404 messages shared before, during, and after the Indian General Elections 2019, encompassing all major Indian political parties and leaders. In addition to the raw noisy user-generated data, we present a fine-grained annotated dataset of 3,848 messages that will be useful to understand the various dimensions of WhatsApp political campaigning. We present several complementary insights into the investigative and sensational news stories from the same period. Exploratory data analysis and experiments showcase several exciting results and future research opportunities. To facilitate reproducible research, we make the anonymized datasets available in the public domain.
翻译:目前,有180多个国家和20亿人民使用的信息传播渠道最受欢迎,广泛使用的信息,已成为在任何社会参与活动期间在群众中传播信息的最受欢迎的媒体之一。最近,若干国家目睹了其在政治和社会运动中的效力和影响。我们看到选举竞选期间信息和宣传流量剧增。在本文中,我们探索了由281个团体、31 078个独特用户和223 404条信息组成的高质量大型用户生成的数据集。印度大选2019年前后,印度大选之前、期间和期间分享的信息中,包括印度所有主要政党和领导人。除了原始的吵闹用户生成的数据外,我们还展示了一组3 848条信息的详细附加数据集,有助于了解“App”政治竞选活动的各个方面。我们对同一时期的调查和耸人听的新闻报道作了一些补充性了解。探索性数据分析和实验展示了若干令人振奋的结果和未来的研究机会。为了便利进行可复制的研究,我们制作了公共域内的匿名数据。