India had its first ‘WhatsApp election.’ We have a million messages from it - Columbia Journalism Review

S.” We started this process with a single iPhone and a recently acquired US phone number. To be fully transparent, we identified ourselves as “Tow Center” with the description “a research group based out of Columbia University in New York.” We did not engage in any conversation. To respect WhatsApp’s fundamentally secure design, we joined groups with at least sixty participants. We focused on those with messages in Hindi or English. (We needed to be able to understand the content if we were to analyze it, and our lead researcher speaks both languages.) If the number of participants was fewer than sixty but the group name was clearly political, the invite link was added to a “Tentative” list that we maintained. If and when the number of members hit sixty, we joined the group. We reviewed our lists almost daily.