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WhatsFarzi: Analyzing Fake / Manipulated content / Misinformation on WhatsApp
As mobile coverage penetrates the most remote areas and data packages become cheaper every day, over 4 billion people across the world today have access to the Internet, of which more than 56% traffic comes from mobile devices. This is especially true in developing countries like India, where more than 430 million Indians out of the total online population of 462 million access the Internet through mobile phones. WhatsApp is the most popular personal messaging service in India, with more than 200 million users, the highest in the world. One of the biggest side effects of WhatsApp’s deep penetration is its misuse as a medium to disseminate misinformation. Last year,…
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The Precog Land
All members of Precog are destined to achieve their dreams. Precog not only helps to actualize our goals but dares us to think beyond what we believe is “possible”. Under the dynamic leadership of Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru (“PK”), the Alumni of Precog have been able to get into the world’s best universities and secure jobs in the most sought after companies. I joined Precog in the Summer of 2016 as an Intern – to explore the field of Security and Privacy. I realized that Precog was much more than working on individual projects rather a community where we brainstormed about fresh research ideas. Every week we used to get together in…
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Twitter’s “suspect users” affects Indian political handles
Twitter removed “suspected users” from their platform during the week of Nov 1, 2018. This is potentially about 2.4 Million handles. Given our interest in analyzing political accounts in India, we were keen on analyzing how much of this affected the Indian political scenario. We found a large number of handles losing followers. Lets look at some of the handles which lost large numbers of followers because of this removal of suspected users. The handle @KirenRijiju had 599K followers on Nov 7, 2018 and it had 475K followers on Nov 8, 2018. The handle lost about 124K followers in one day. Below is a graph showing this in more…