The power of WhatsApp Messenger in political campaigning is undeniable, especially considering its extensive user base. The study articulated in ‘PoliWAM: An Exploration of a Large Scale Corpus of Political Discussions on WhatsApp Messenger’ offers a comprehensive analysis of over 223,404 messages from 281 groups, involving 31,078 unique users during the Indian General Elections 2019.

Notable insights include:

• A large-scale dataset encompassing messaging data across major Indian political parties
• Fine-grained annotated dataset of 3,848 messages to unpack the intricacies of WhatsApp political campaigning
• Examination of investigative and sensational news stories concurrent with the election
• Emergence of exciting results and research opportunities from exploratory data analysis

This paper presents compelling evidence of WhatsApp’s influence in shaping political discourse. By making the anonymized datasets public, it encourages reproducible research in the domain of digital political communication, holding potential for improving the understanding of social media’s impact on democratic processes.

Dive deeper into the study: PoliWAM: An Exploration of a Large Scale Corpus of Political Discussions on WhatsApp Messenger