Authors:
Ivandro Claudino de Sá
1
;
José Maria Monteiro
1
;
José Maria Franco da Silva
1
;
Leonardo Monteiro Medeiros
1
;
Pedro Jorge Chaves Mourão
2
and
Lucas Cabral Carneiro da Cunha
1
Affiliations:
1
Computer Science Department, Federal University of Ceará, Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil
;
2
Department of Sociology, Ceará State University, Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil
Keyword(s):
Misinformation Detection, Natural Language Processing, WhatsApp, Social Media.
Abstract:
The large-scale dissemination of misinformation through social media has become a critical issue, harming social stability, democracy, and public health. In Brazil, 48% of the population uses WhatsApp to get news. So, many groups have been used this instant messaging application to spread misinformation, especially as part of articulated political or ideological campaigns. In this context, WhatsApp provides an important feature: the public groups. These groups are so suitable for misinformation dissemination. Thus, developing software frameworks to monitor the misinformation spreading in WhatsApp public groups has become a field of high interest both in academia, government and industry. In this work, we present an entire platform, called Digital Lighthouse, that aims for finding WhatsApp public groups, besides extracting, cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing misinformation that spread in such groups. Using the Digital Lighthouse, we built three different datasets. We hope that our p
latform can help journalists and researchers to understand the misinformation propagation in Brazil.
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