Characterizing the public perception of WhatsApp through the lens of media

Josemar Alves Caetano1, Gabriel Magno1, Evandro Cunha1,2, Wagner Meira Jr.1, Humberto T. Marques-Neto3, Virgilio Almeida1,4 1 Dept. of Computer Science, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), 2 Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL), The Netherlands 3 Dept. of Computer Science, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais (PUC Minas), Brazil 4 Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, USA {josemarcaetano,magno,evandrocunha,meira,virgilio}@dcc.ufmg.br,[email protected]

ABSTRACT Institute Digital News Report 2018 [26] shows a rise in the use of WhatsApp is, as of 2018, a significant component of the global messaging applications, including WhatsApp, as sources of news information and communication infrastructure, especially in devel- in several parts of the world. This report indicates that WhatsApp oping countries. However, probably due to its strong end-to-end use for news has almost tripled since 2014 and it has surpassed encryption, WhatsApp became an attractive place for the dissemi- Twitter as a communication system in many countries. One of the nation of misinformation, extremism and other forms of undesir- alleged reasons for this is that users are looking for more private able behavior. In this paper, we investigate the public perception of and secure spaces to communicate. In addition to this, WhatsApp WhatsApp through the lens of media. We analyze two large datasets turned out to be an important platform for political propaganda and of news and show the kind of content that is being associated with election campaigns, having held a central role in elections in Brazil, WhatsApp in different regions of the world and over time. Our anal- India [17], Kenya, Malaysia, and Zimbabwe, for instance. yses include the examination of named entities, general vocabulary Also, WhatsApp has been frequently associated with the spread of and topics addressed in news articles that mention WhatsApp, as misinformation and disinformation [37]. well as the polarity of these texts. Among other results, we demon- Despite its prominence, continued growth and opacity, there has strate that the vocabulary and topics around the term “whatsapp” been an insufficient number of studies exploring the various aspects in the media have been changing over the years and in 2018 con- of WhatsApp and similar mobile messaging applications [19]. Since centrate on matters related to misinformation, politics and criminal WhatsApp provides encrypted end-to-end communication, it is a scams. More generally, our findings are useful to understand the great challenge to conduct large-scale analyses on the behavior impact that tools like WhatsApp play in the contemporary society of its users. In this work, we take a different approach: instead of and how they are seen by the communities themselves. looking at inside the system, we focus on the public perception of WhatsApp from outside sources. The goals of this paper are: CCS CONCEPTS • to characterize how media in different countries interpret • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collab- the role of WhatsApp in society; orative and social computing; Collaborative and social computing • to analyze the evolution of the perception of WhatsApp over systems and tools; time, from its creation until its massive popularization; • to comprehend how sensitive topics, such as politics, crime KEYWORDS and extremism, are related to WhatsApp in different regions digital humanities; whatsapp; media of the world and in distinct periods of time. To achieve these goals, we explore different techniques: analysis 1 INTRODUCTION of Web search behavior, co-occurring named entities and vocabu- arXiv:1808.05927v1 [cs.SI] 17 Aug 2018 The messaging service WhatsApp is, as of 2018, one of the most lary, co-occurrence networks, topics addressed and textual polarity. rapidly growing compo