Digital lighthouse: a platform for monitoring misinformation in WhatsApp public groups

Abstract

Actually, 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 use WhatsApp to get news. So, many groups have been used this instant messaging application in order 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 a platform, called Digital Lighthouse, for finding, gathering, analyzing, and visualize public groups in WhatsApp. In order to evaluate our methodology, we built three different datasets. We hope that our platform can help journalists and researchers to understand the misinformation propagation in Brazil.