Jettisoning Junk Messaging in the Era of End-to-End Encryption: A Case Study of WhatsApp

Abstract

WhatsApp is a popular messaging app used by over a billion users around the globe. Due to this popularity, spam on WhatsApp is an important issue. Despite this, the distribution of spam via WhatsApp remains understudied by researchers, in part because of the end-toend encryption offered by the platform. This paper addresses this gap by studying spam on a dataset of 2.6 million messages sent to 5,051 public WhatsApp groups in India over 300 days. First, we characterise spam content shared within public groups and find that nearly 1 in 10 messages is spam. We observe a wide selection of topics ranging from job ads to adult content, and find that spammers post both URLs and phone numbers to promote material. Second, we inspect the nature of spammers themselves. We find that spam is often disseminated by groups of phone numbers, and that spam messages are generally shared for longer duration than non-spam messages. Finally, we devise content and activity based detection algorithms that can counter spam.

The Revolution Will Be Forwarded: Interrogating India's WhatsApp Imaginary

“…Numerous WhatsApp studies have examined the chat-based app through young people's uses (Ahad & Lim, 2014;Thelwall & Vis, 2017) and focusing on younger demographics carries over into social media research more broadly (Rosales & Fernández-Ardèvol, 2016). In interviewing the 40 + demographic, we tapped into an underrepresented population, and also received insights from people who remembered what a life before WhatsApp was like (see Agarwal et al, 2021). This provided useful contemporary understandings from specific past perspectives.…”