Kiran Garimella
Assistant Professor at Rutgers University
Talk recording
I will talk about with our recent work on tracking misinformation on end to end encrypted platforms like WhatsApp. I’ll start by explaining need for collecting data from encrypted platforms and the challenges it entails. Next, I’ll discuss our ongoing work on collecting large scale data from WhatsApp using an opt-in data donation approach. Using this data, I will discuss how political parties in India and Brazil use WhatsApp to spread misinformation and hate speech. Finally, I will briefly discuss developing solutions for content moderation on WhatsApp, which is non trivial due to the end to end encryption. I will end with a discussion on potential future research directions in this space.
About the speaker
Kiran Garimella’s research deals with using large-scale data to tackle societal issues such as misinformation, political polarization, or hate speech. Prior to joining Rutgers, Garimella was the Michael Hammer postdoc at the Institute for Data, Systems and Society at MIT. Before joining MIT, he was a postdoc at EPFL, Switzerland. His research focuses on using digital data for social good, including areas like polarization, misinformation and human migration. His work on studying and mitigating polarization on social media won the best student paper awards at ICWSM 2021, WSDM 2017, and WebScience 2017. Kiran received his Ph.D. in computer science at Aalto University, Finland, and Masters & Bachelors from IIIT Hyderabad, India. Prior to his Ph.D., he worked as a Research Engineer at Yahoo Research, Barcelona, and QCRI, Doha.
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