The study ‘PoliWAM: An Exploration of a Large Scale Corpus of Political Discussions on WhatsApp Messenger’ dives into the political campaigns and propaganda spread through WhatsApp in India. Important points from the paper include:

• Examination of a dataset from 281 WhatsApp groups across major Indian political parties and leaders.
• The dataset covers 31,078 unique users and 223,404 messages, offering insights into political communication on social platforms.
• A fine-grained annotated dataset of messages is provided to aid the understanding of WhatsApp’s role in political campaigning.
• The paper presents exploratory data analyses and highlights the potential for future research efforts.

The implications of WhatsApp as a medium for political communication are significant, especially in understanding its role in influencing public opinion. The anonymized dataset provided is a valuable resource for further investigation into the strategies and effects of social media on election outcomes.

Read more about the research here.