Report Release: Crowdsourcing Aid

From April to June 2021, India was ravaged by the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.

With a steep increase in the number of infections, cities ran out of drugs, medical oxygen, hospitals and other necessary medical supplies.

The second wave was a public health crisis, but also an information crisis. People turned to social media to request for resources outside their geographies and immediate networks.

The circulation of leads for medical aid led to a concomitant increase in circulation of inaccurate and fraudulent leads.

Through the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in India, Tattle tracked 21 Relief groups on WhatsApp.

Over eight weeks, we collected 16K+ messages and 2K+ images.

We aimed to understand how relief was coordinated on WhatsApp, the most widely used chat platform in India.

How, if at all, did groups tackle obsolete or fraudulent leads on a platform without centralized moderation?

And how were public/private boundaries navigated on a closed messaging app during public oriented action?

Here are some of the salient findings:

• Even on WhatsApp, people relied heavily on other social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram to find verified leads. Screenshots of posts from these platforms were commonly used to cross-post information. Twitter has fewer than 20 million users in India. People act as ‘go-betweens’ and connect WhatsApp users to information on Twitter and Instagram, giving content on these platforms greater reach. Important context here is that Twitter has fewer than 25 million users in India. WhatsApp has over 300 million.

• A comparison of phone leads shared in the WhatsApp groups with a national level database of verified leads maintained by a fact-checking group and with a crowdsourced database of ‘scam’ numbers revealed a low overlap. Less than 17% of the leads were common between the WhatsApp groups we were tracking and the databases. This indicates the scale of information that was circulated and challenge of verifying content during the second wave of the pandemic in India.

• Volunteering groups asked for patient information in specific templates to make relief work more efficient. People shared doctor prescriptions, medical receipts and sensitive personal information (including the Biometric ID Aadhar) in these groups when requesting for help. Private information was circulated in groups of unknown persons who had come together for public oriented service. Public and private boundaries are more blurred in emergencies which demands greater attention to data deletion protocols by group admins.

• The frequency of conversations declined in these groups over time. Some groups were repurposed to share information unrelated to Covid-19 such as chartered accountancy related webinars, reflecting the use of WhatsApp in digital marketing.

The full report has a lot more details. The report and a summary of trends can be accessed here:

https://tattle.co.in/articles/covid-whatsapp-public-groups/

This is an interactive visualization of the images collected from these groups:

https://tattle.co.in/articles/covid-whatsapp-public-groups/t-sne/

Spot a trend that we have missed? Or questions we should analyze further?

Do let us know by emailing tarunima@tattle.co.in.

Hope you're all doing well!

Best,
Tarunima