WhatsApp for Monitoring and Response during Critical Events: Aggie in the Ghana 2016 Election
Andrés Moreno, Philip Garrison, Karthik Bhat · UNU Collections (United Nations University) · 2017
Mobile Instant Messaging platforms like WhatsApp are becoming increasingly popular. They have expanded access to digital text, audio, picture, and video messaging. Integrating them into existing crisis monitoring and response platforms and workflows can help reach a wider population. This paper describes a first attempt to integrate WhatsApp into Aggie, a social media aggregating and monitoring platform. We report on the deployment of this integration during Ghana’s 2016 election, along with Twitter, Facebook, and RSS. The WhatsApp messages collected by Aggie during the election improved the effectiveness of the monitoring efforts. Thanks to these messages, more incidents were found and escalated to the Electoral Commission and security forces. From interviews with people involved in monitoring and response, we found that the WhatsApp integration helped their coordination and monitoring activities.