Aditya Vashistha, assistant professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science (CIS), used his 2023 seed grant to support fieldwork in India for a project on how misinformation spreads in private online environments such as WhatsApp. On X or Facebook, conversations can be moderated by AI tools or human readers, he explained. On WhatsApp, conversations are encrypted so only community members can flag or respond to problematic content.