“Click Here to Join”: A Large-Scale Analysis of Topics Discussed by Brazilian Public Groups on WhatsApp
Resumo
WhatsApp has many similarities with online social networks, as it allows connections between multiple people and massive communication by sharing content with your contacts and public groups,which brings people together to discuss a topic. Even though it is one of the most popular social media in the world, there is a lack of a systematic understanding of the Whatsapp ecosystem, especially when it comes to knowing the subjects discussed in public groups and how other users find/join those groups. In this direction, our goal is to investigate how public groups are shared on the Web and also map the main topics existing within this ecosystem. For this, we perform a large-scale collection, spanning four main sources on the Web for sharing groups, with more than 270k WhatsApp public groups, categorizing and analyzing this environment. Our results shed light on a large existence of groups focused on topics such as friendship, pop culture, stickers, sales, jobs, education, and even adult content suggesting the many uses of the WhatsApp tool. We also found key differences in groups according to the source where it was posted. Moreover, we discovered how group links work to persuade users from other platforms into the underground environment of WhatsApp. Malicious groups abuse its closed architecture and low moderation for illicit practices such as selling fake money and cloned cards. Furthermore, our analysis also found evidence of automated behavior in malicious group sharing. Finally, we discuss implications and measures that can be taken to address these issues.
Palavras-chave:
WhatsApp, public groups, instant message, chat, social network
Referências
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Josemar Alves Caetano, Gabriel Magno, Marcos Gonçalves, Jussara Almeida, Humberto T. Marques-Neto, and Virgílio Almeida. 2019. Characterizing Attention Cascades in WhatsApp Groups. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science (Boston, Massachusetts, USA) (WebSci ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 27–36. https://doi.org/10.1145/3292522.3326018
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Karen Church and Rodrigo de Oliveira. 2013. What’s up with Whatsapp? Comparing Mobile Instant Messaging Behaviors with Traditional SMS. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Munich, Germany) (MobileHCI ’13). ACM, NY, USA, 352–361. https://doi.org/10.1145/2493190.2493225
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Kiran Garimella and Gareth Tyson. 2018. WhatApp Doc? A First Look at WhatsApp Public Group Data. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (Stanford, USA) (ICWSM ’18).
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Mohamad Hoseini, Philipe Melo, Manoel Júnior, Fabrício Benevenuto, Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran, Anja Feldmann, and Savvas Zannettou. 2020. Demystifying the Messaging Platforms’ Ecosystem Through the Lens of Twitter. In Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (Virtual Event, USA) (IMC ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 345–359. https://doi.org/10.1145/3419394.3423651
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Hamed Jelodar, Yongli Wang, Chi Yuan, Xia Feng, Xiahui Jiang, Yanchao Li, and Liang Zhao. 2019. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and topic modeling: models, applications, a survey. Multimedia Tools and Applications 78, 11 (2019), 15169–15211. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-018-6894-4
Caio Machado, Beatriz Kira, Vidya Narayanan, Bence Kollanyi, and Philip Howard. 2019. A Study of Misinformation in WhatsApp Groups with a Focus on the Brazilian Presidential Elections.. In Companion Proceedings of The 2019 World Wide Web Conference (San Francisco, USA) (WWW ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1013–1019. https://doi.org/10.1145/3308560.3316738
Philipe Melo, Johnnatan Messias, Gustavo Resende, Kiran Garimella, Jussara Almeida, and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2019. WhatsApp Monitor: A Fact-Checking System for WhatsApp. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM ’19, Vol. 13). AAAI, 676–677.
Philipe Melo, Carolina Coimbra Vieira, Kiran Garimella, Pedro OS Vaz de Melo, and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2019. Can WhatsApp Counter Misinformation by Limiting Message Forwarding?. In International Conference on Complex Networks and Their Applications (Lisboa, Portugal). Springer, 372–384.
Nic Newman, Richard Fletcher, Antonis Kalogeropoulos, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. 2021. Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2021. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Kenton P. O’Hara, Michael Massimi, Richard Harper, Simon Rubens, and Jessica Morris. 2014. Everyday Dwelling with WhatsApp. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (Baltimore, USA) (CSCW ’14). ACM, NY, USA, 1131–1143. https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531679
Julio CS Reis, Philipe Melo, Kiran Garimella, and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2020. Can WhatsApp benefit from debunked fact-checked stories to reduce misinformation? Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review (2020). https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-035
Gustavo Resende, Philipe Melo, Julio C. S. Reis, Marisa Vasconcelos, Jussara M. Almeida, and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2019. Analyzing Textual (Mis)Information Shared in WhatsApp Groups. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science (Boston, USA) (WebSci ’19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 225–234. https://doi.org/10.1145/3292522.3326029
Gustavo Resende, Philipe Melo, Hugo Sousa, Johnnatan Messias, Marisa Vasconcelos, Jussara Almeida, and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2019. (Mis)Information Dissemination in WhatsApp: Gathering, Analyzing and Countermeasures. In The World Wide Web Conference (San Francisco, CA, USA) (WWW ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 818–828. https://doi.org/10.1145/3308558.3313688
Avi Rosenfeld, Sigal Sina, David Sarne, Or Avidov, and Sarit Kraus. 2018. WhatsApp usage patterns and prediction of demographic characteristics without access to message content. Demographic Research 39, 22, 647–670. https://doi.org/10.4054/DemRes.2018.39.22
Punyajoy Saha, Binny Mathew, Kiran Garimella, and Animesh Mukherjee. 2021. “Short is the Road That Leads from Fear to Hate”: Fear Speech in Indian WhatsApp Groups (WWW ’21). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1110–1121. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442381.3450137
Michael Seufert, Tobias Hoßfeld, Anika Schwind, Valentin Burger, and Phuoc Tran-Gia. 2016. Group-based communication in WhatsApp. In 2016 IFIP Networking Conference and Workshops. 536–541. https://doi.org/10.1109/IFIPNetworking.2016.7497256
Ahmad Shehabat, Teodor Mitew, and Yahia Alzoubi. 2017. Encrypted jihad:Investigating the role of Telegram App in lone wolf attacks in the West. Journal of Strategic Security 10, 3 (2017), 27–53. https://doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.10.3.1604
Felipe B Soares, Raquel. Recuero, Taiane Volcan, Giane Fagundes, and Giéle Sodré. 2021. Research note: Bolsonaro’s firehose: How Covid-19 disinformation on WhatsApp was used to fight a government political crisis in Brazil. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review (2021). https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-54
Statista. 2022. WhatsApp in Brazil - statistics & facts. Statista Research Department. https://www.statista.com/topics/7731/whatsapp-in-brazil/ 11 de fev. de 2022
Aleksandra Urman and Stefan Katz. 2022. What they do in the shadows: examining the far-right networks on Telegram. Information, Communication & Society 25, 7 (2022), 904–923. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1803946
Marisa Vasconcelos, Erica Pereira, Samuel Guimarães, Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Philipe Melo, and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2020. Analyzing YouTube Videos Shared on Whatsapp in the Early COVID-19 Crisis. In Proceedings of the Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web (São Luís, Brazil) (WebMedia ’20). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 25–28. https://doi.org/10.1145/3428658.3431090
Carolina Vieira, Philipe Melo, Pedro OS V Melo, and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2019. O Paradoxo da Viralização de Informação Criptografada no WhatsApp. In Anais do XXXVII Simpósio Brasileiro de Redes de Computadores e Sistemas Distribuídos (Gramado, Brasil) (SBRC’19). SBC, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil, 403–416. https://doi.org/10.5753/sbrc.2019.7375
Jeremy Bowles, Horacio Larreguy, and Shelley Liu. 2020. Countering misinformation via WhatsApp: Preliminary evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic in Zimbabwe. PloS one 15, 10 (2020), e0240005. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240005
Victor S. Bursztyn and Larry Birnbaum. 2019. Thousands of Small, Constant Rallies: A Large-Scale Analysis of Partisan WhatsApp Groups. In 2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM’19). 484–488. https://doi.org/10.1145/3341161.3342905
Josemar Alves Caetano, Gabriel Magno, Marcos Gonçalves, Jussara Almeida, Humberto T. Marques-Neto, and Virgílio Almeida. 2019. Characterizing Attention Cascades in WhatsApp Groups. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science (Boston, Massachusetts, USA) (WebSci ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 27–36. https://doi.org/10.1145/3292522.3326018
Niken Dwi Wahyu Cahyani, Nurul Hidayah Ab Rahman, William Bradley Glisson, and Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo. 2017. The role of mobile forensics in terrorism investigations involving the use of cloud storage service and communication apps. Mobile Networks and Applications 22, 2 (2017), 240–254. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-016-0791-8
Danielle Cassita. 2019. Agora é ilegal vender curtidas e seguidores em redes sociais. Tecmundo [link]. 09 de fev de 2019
Letícia Cesarino. 2020. Como vencer uma eleição sem sair de casa: a ascensão do populismo digital no Brasil. Internet & Sociedade 1, 1 (Feb. 2020), 91 – 120.
Viktor Chagas. 2021. Meu malvado favorito: os memes bolsonaristas de WhatsApp e os acontecimentos políticos no Brasil. Revista Estudos Históricos 34, 72 (2021), 169–196.
Karen Church and Rodrigo de Oliveira. 2013. What’s up with Whatsapp? Comparing Mobile Instant Messaging Behaviors with Traditional SMS. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Munich, Germany) (MobileHCI ’13). ACM, NY, USA, 352–361. https://doi.org/10.1145/2493190.2493225
DataSenado. 2019. Redes Sociais, Notícias Falsas e Privacidade de Dados na Internet. Instituto de Pesquisa DataSenado. [link]. 10 de dez. de 2019
Marcella Duarte. 2019. Viciado em grupos de imitação de sons no WhatsApp? Ele é o culpado. Uol tilt https://bit.ly/3iQR5Qs 24 de out. de 2019
Rafael Evangelista and Fernanda Bruno. 2019. WhatsApp and political instability in Brazil: targeted messages and political radicalisation. Internet Policy Review 8, 4 (2019), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.4.1434
Kiran Garimella and Gareth Tyson. 2018. WhatApp Doc? A First Look at WhatsApp Public Group Data. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (Stanford, USA) (ICWSM ’18).
Juliana Gragnani. 2018. Um Brasil dividido e movido a notícias falsas: uma semana dentro de 272 grupos políticos no WhatsApp (in portuguese). BBC. https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-45666742. 05 de out. de 2018
Mohamad Hoseini, Philipe Melo, Manoel Júnior, Fabrício Benevenuto, Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran, Anja Feldmann, and Savvas Zannettou. 2020. Demystifying the Messaging Platforms’ Ecosystem Through the Lens of Twitter. In Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (Virtual Event, USA) (IMC ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 345–359. https://doi.org/10.1145/3419394.3423651
R Tallal Javed, Muhammad Usama, Waleed Iqbal, Junaid Qadir, Gareth Tyson, Ignacio Castro, and Kiran Garimella. 2022. A deep dive into COVID-19-related messages on WhatsApp in Pakistan. Social Network Analysis and Mining 12, 1, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-021-00833-0
Hamed Jelodar, Yongli Wang, Chi Yuan, Xia Feng, Xiahui Jiang, Yanchao Li, and Liang Zhao. 2019. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and topic modeling: models, applications, a survey. Multimedia Tools and Applications 78, 11 (2019), 15169–15211. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-018-6894-4
Caio Machado, Beatriz Kira, Vidya Narayanan, Bence Kollanyi, and Philip Howard. 2019. A Study of Misinformation in WhatsApp Groups with a Focus on the Brazilian Presidential Elections.. In Companion Proceedings of The 2019 World Wide Web Conference (San Francisco, USA) (WWW ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1013–1019. https://doi.org/10.1145/3308560.3316738
Philipe Melo, Johnnatan Messias, Gustavo Resende, Kiran Garimella, Jussara Almeida, and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2019. WhatsApp Monitor: A Fact-Checking System for WhatsApp. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM ’19, Vol. 13). AAAI, 676–677.
Philipe Melo, Carolina Coimbra Vieira, Kiran Garimella, Pedro OS Vaz de Melo, and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2019. Can WhatsApp Counter Misinformation by Limiting Message Forwarding?. In International Conference on Complex Networks and Their Applications (Lisboa, Portugal). Springer, 372–384.
Nic Newman, Richard Fletcher, Antonis Kalogeropoulos, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. 2021. Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2021. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Kenton P. O’Hara, Michael Massimi, Richard Harper, Simon Rubens, and Jessica Morris. 2014. Everyday Dwelling with WhatsApp. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (Baltimore, USA) (CSCW ’14). ACM, NY, USA, 1131–1143. https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531679
Julio CS Reis, Philipe Melo, Kiran Garimella, and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2020. Can WhatsApp benefit from debunked fact-checked stories to reduce misinformation? Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review (2020). https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-035
Gustavo Resende, Philipe Melo, Julio C. S. Reis, Marisa Vasconcelos, Jussara M. Almeida, and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2019. Analyzing Textual (Mis)Information Shared in WhatsApp Groups. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science (Boston, USA) (WebSci ’19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 225–234. https://doi.org/10.1145/3292522.3326029
Gustavo Resende, Philipe Melo, Hugo Sousa, Johnnatan Messias, Marisa Vasconcelos, Jussara Almeida, and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2019. (Mis)Information Dissemination in WhatsApp: Gathering, Analyzing and Countermeasures. In The World Wide Web Conference (San Francisco, CA, USA) (WWW ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 818–828. https://doi.org/10.1145/3308558.3313688
Avi Rosenfeld, Sigal Sina, David Sarne, Or Avidov, and Sarit Kraus. 2018. WhatsApp usage patterns and prediction of demographic characteristics without access to message content. Demographic Research 39, 22, 647–670. https://doi.org/10.4054/DemRes.2018.39.22
Punyajoy Saha, Binny Mathew, Kiran Garimella, and Animesh Mukherjee. 2021. “Short is the Road That Leads from Fear to Hate”: Fear Speech in Indian WhatsApp Groups (WWW ’21). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1110–1121. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442381.3450137
Michael Seufert, Tobias Hoßfeld, Anika Schwind, Valentin Burger, and Phuoc Tran-Gia. 2016. Group-based communication in WhatsApp. In 2016 IFIP Networking Conference and Workshops. 536–541. https://doi.org/10.1109/IFIPNetworking.2016.7497256
Ahmad Shehabat, Teodor Mitew, and Yahia Alzoubi. 2017. Encrypted jihad:Investigating the role of Telegram App in lone wolf attacks in the West. Journal of Strategic Security 10, 3 (2017), 27–53. https://doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.10.3.1604
Felipe B Soares, Raquel. Recuero, Taiane Volcan, Giane Fagundes, and Giéle Sodré. 2021. Research note: Bolsonaro’s firehose: How Covid-19 disinformation on WhatsApp was used to fight a government political crisis in Brazil. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review (2021). https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-54
Statista. 2022. WhatsApp in Brazil - statistics & facts. Statista Research Department. https://www.statista.com/topics/7731/whatsapp-in-brazil/ 11 de fev. de 2022
Aleksandra Urman and Stefan Katz. 2022. What they do in the shadows: examining the far-right networks on Telegram. Information, Communication & Society 25, 7 (2022), 904–923. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1803946
Marisa Vasconcelos, Erica Pereira, Samuel Guimarães, Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Philipe Melo, and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2020. Analyzing YouTube Videos Shared on Whatsapp in the Early COVID-19 Crisis. In Proceedings of the Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web (São Luís, Brazil) (WebMedia ’20). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 25–28. https://doi.org/10.1145/3428658.3431090
Carolina Vieira, Philipe Melo, Pedro OS V Melo, and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2019. O Paradoxo da Viralização de Informação Criptografada no WhatsApp. In Anais do XXXVII Simpósio Brasileiro de Redes de Computadores e Sistemas Distribuídos (Gramado, Brasil) (SBRC’19). SBC, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil, 403–416. https://doi.org/10.5753/sbrc.2019.7375
Publicado
07/11/2022
Como Citar
KANSAON, Daniel Pimentel; MELO, Philipe De Freitas; BENEVENUTO, Fabrício.
“Click Here to Join”: A Large-Scale Analysis of Topics Discussed by Brazilian Public Groups on WhatsApp. In: BRAZILIAN SYMPOSIUM ON MULTIMEDIA AND THE WEB (WEBMEDIA), 28. , 2022, Curitiba.
Anais [...].
Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação,
2022
.
p. 57-67.
