Beyond Groups: Uncovering Dynamic Communities on the WhatsApp Network of Information Dissemination

In this paper, we investigate the network of information dissemination that emerges from group communication in the increasingly popular WhatsApp platform. We aim to reveal properties of the underlying structure that facilitates content spread in the system, despite limitations the application imposes in group membership. Our analyses reveal a number of strongly connected user communities that cross the boundaries of groups, suggesting that such boundaries offer little constraint to information spread. We also show that, despite frequent changes in community membership, there are consistent co-sharing activities among some users which, even while holding broad content diversity, lead to high coverage of the network in terms of groups and individual users.