Detecting Misinformation Virality on WhatsApp

Fernanda Nascimento, Melissa Sousa, Gustavo Martins, José Maria Monteiro, Javam Machado

2025

Abstract

In recent years, the large-scale dissemination of misinformation through social media has become a critical issue, undermining public health, social stability, and even democracy. In many developing countries, such as Brazil, India, and Mexico, the WhatsApp messaging app is one of the primary sources of misinformation. Recently, automatic misinformation detection using machine learning methods has emerged as an active research topic. However, not all misinformation is equally significant. For instance, widely spread misinformation can have a greater impact and tends to be more persuasive to users. In this context, we address the early detection of misinformation virality by analyzing the textual content of WhatsApp messages. First, we introduced a large-scale, labeled, and publicly available dataset of WhatsApp messages, called FakeViralWhatsApp.Br, which contains 52,080 labeled messages along with their respective frequencies. Next, we conducted a series of binary classification experiments, combining three feature extraction methods, three distinct token generation strategies, two preprocessing approaches, and six classification algorithms to classify messages into viral and non-viral categories. Our best results achieved an F1-score of 0.98 for general posts and 1.0 for misinformation messages, demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed approach.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Nascimento F., Sousa M., Martins G., Monteiro J. and Machado J. (2025). Detecting Misinformation Virality on WhatsApp. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Data Science, Technology and Applications - Volume 1: DATA; ISBN 978-989-758-758-0, SciTePress, pages 685-692. DOI: 10.5220/0013646800003967

in Bibtex Style

@conference{data25,
author={Fernanda Nascimento and Melissa Sousa and Gustavo Martins and José Monteiro and Javam Machado},
title={Detecting Misinformation Virality on WhatsApp},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Data Science, Technology and Applications - Volume 1: DATA},
year={2025},
pages={685-692},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013646800003967},
isbn={978-989-758-758-0},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Data Science, Technology and Applications - Volume 1: DATA
TI - Detecting Misinformation Virality on WhatsApp
SN - 978-989-758-758-0
AU - Nascimento F.
AU - Sousa M.
AU - Martins G.
AU - Monteiro J.
AU - Machado J.
PY - 2025
SP - 685
EP - 692
DO - 10.5220/0013646800003967
PB - SciTePress