Can WhatsApp benefit from debunked fact-checked stories to reduce misinformation?
Open accessAbstract
WhatsApp was alleged to have been widely used to spread misinformation and propaganda during the 2018 elections in Brazil and the 2019 elections in India. Due to the private encrypted nature of the messages on WhatsApp, it is hard to track the dissemination of misinformation at scale. In this work, using public WhatsApp data from […]
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Perceptual hashing-based client-side scanning mechanisms currently proposed are not robust to detection avoidance attacks.
“show current systems to not be robust”
From Adversarial Detection Avoidance Attacks: Evaluating the robustness of perceptual hashing-based client-side scanning (2021) · cites this paper as [46]
The Methods section says PDQ hashing can detect near-similar images, including some with different crops or overlaid text, and the Implications section proposes on-device hash matching. Neither section evaluates detection-avoidance attacks or says that current systems are not robust to them (searched for attacks, evasion, and robustness). (LLM, conf=0.76)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
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Cites
Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election
Allcott, H., & Gentzkow, M. (2017) · Journal of Economic Perspectives · doi:10.1257/jep.31.2.211 · Cited by 6,767 · see citing works
The Elusive Backfire Effect: Mass Attitudes’ Steadfast Factual Adherence
Wood, T., & Porter, E. (2019) · Political Behavior · doi:10.1007/s11109-018-9443-y · Cited by 904 · see citing works
What types of COVID-19 conspiracies are populated by Twitter bots?
Ferrara, E. (2020) · First Monday · doi:10.5210/fm.v25i6.10633 · Cited by 223 · cited 1× · see citing works
“Furthermore, during the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an uptick in rumours and conspiracies spreading through online platforms(Ferrara, 2020).”
BackgroundImages and Misinformation in Political Groups: Evidence from WhatsApp in India
Garimella, K., & Eckles, D. (2020) · Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review · doi:10.37016/mr-2020-030 · Cited by 111 · see citing works
Self-citation
Flagged first, then by citations
Research works printed but not linked: 13
- Arun, C. (2019). On WhatsApp, Rumours, Lynchings, and the Indian Government. Economic & Political Weekly, 54(6), Forthcoming. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3336127
- Clayton, K., Blair, S., Busam, J. A., Forstner, S., Glance, J., Green, G., Kawata, A., Kovvuri, A., Martin, J., Morgan, E., Sandhu, M., Sang, R., Scholz-Bright, R., Welch, A., Wolff, A., Zhou, A., & Nyhan, B. (2019). Real solutions for fake news? Measuring the effectiveness of general warnings and fact-check tags in reducing belief in false stories on social media. Political Behavior, 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-019-09533-0 · DOI · Paper page
- Delcker, J., Wanat, Z., & Scott, M. (2020). The coronavirus fake news pandemic sweeping WhatsApp. Politico Europe Edition. www.politico.eu/article/the-coronavirus-covid19-fake-news-pandemic-sweeping-whatsapp -misinformation/. · DOI
- Farid, H. (2018). Reining in Online Abuses. Technology & Innovation, 19(3), 593-599. http://dx.doi.org/10.21300/19.3.2018.593 · DOI
- Garimella, K., & Tyson, G. (2018). Whatapp doc? A first look at whatsapp public group data. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media – ICWSM, 511-517. https://aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM18/paper/view/17865 · DOI
- Gupta, H. & Taneja, H. (2018). WhatsApp Has a Fake News Problem-That Can Be Fixed without Breaking Encryption. Columbia Journalism Review. www.cjr.org/tow_center/whatsapp-doesnt-have-to-break-encryption-to-beat-fake-news.php.
- Melo, P., Messias, J., Resende, G., Garimella, K., Almeida, J., & Benevenuto, F. (2019). WhatsApp monitor: a fact-checking system for WhatsApp. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media – ICWSM, 676-677. https://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/3271 · DOI
- Moreno, A., Garrison, P., & Bhat, K. (2017). Whatsapp for monitoring and response during critical events: Aggie in the ghana 2016 election. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management - ISCRAM. https://collections.unu.edu/view/UNU:6189
- Nyhan, B., & Reifler, J. (2010). When corrections fail: The persistence of political misperceptions. Political Behavior, 32(2), 303-330. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-010-9112-2 · DOI · Paper page
- Reis, J. C. S., Melo, P., Garimella, K., Almeida, J. M., Eckles, D., & Benevenuto, F. (2020). A Dataset of Fact-Checked Images Shared on WhatsApp During the Brazilian and Indian Elections. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media - ICWSM, 903-908. https://aaai.org/ojs/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/7356 · DOI
- Resende, G., Melo, P., Sousa, H., Messias, J., Vasconcelos, M., Almeida, J., & Benevenuto, F. (2019). (Mis) Information Dissemination in WhatsApp: Gathering, Analyzing and Countermeasures. In Proceedings of The World Wide Web Conference – WWW, 818-828. https://doi.org/10.1145/3308558.3313688 · DOI
- Song, H., Dharmapurikar, S., Turner, J., & Lockwood, J. (2005). Fast hash table lookup using extended bloom filter: an aid to network processing. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 35(4), 181-192. https://doi.org/10.1145/1080091.1080114 · DOI
- Zauner, C. (2010). Implementation and benchmarking of perceptual image hash functions. Master’s thesis, Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences. http://phash.org/docs/pubs/thesis_zauner.pdf
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Jain, S., Cretu, A.-M., & de Montjoye, Y.-A. (2021) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2106.09820 · Cited by 21 · see citing works
- Authors
- Reis, J. C. S., Melo, P., Garimella, K., & Benevenuto, F.
- Affiliations
- Computer Science Department, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil
- Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (BR)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
- Venue
- Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review
- Published
- 2020-08-20
- ISSN
- 2766-1652 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3047438096
- Cited by
- 46
- References
- 4
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 13 · 2021: 12
- FWCI
- 11.37
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- diamond
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (acceptedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Funders
- Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior
- Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico
- Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Statistical and Nonlinear Physics › Complex Network Analysis Techniques
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Spam and Phishing Detection
- Keywords
- WhatsApp, misinformation, fact-checking, encrypted messaging, election misinformation, 2018 Brazilian elections, propaganda
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