How WhatsApp is trying to stop the spread of misinformation
WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging app, has imposed limits on how many people users can forward messages to. As of Monday, January 21st, users can only forward a message five times. The company said the move is to combat "misinformation and rumours."
But the limit on forwarding has been in place in India for months already – a response to a series of tragic lynchings and violence sparked by rumours and disinformation spread over WhatsApp. India is WhatsApp's largest market, with about 200 million users.
Digging into how WhatsApp is used in India sheds light on how the violence happened. It also reveals how design decisions taken by tech companies early on, can have major social impacts down the road.
Nandagopal Rajan is a New Delhi-based technology journalist and New Media Editor at The Indian Express. He said that part of the problem with disinformation comes from the sudden spike in new internet users.
"India as of now has between 500 and 600 million internet users. This number has exploded in the past 18 months or so because of one company offering dirt cheap data and devices," Rajan told Spark host Nora Young, adding that this means there are about 200 million Indians who are new to the internet, unlike the 300 million who would have had prior exposure to computers and the internet.
WhatsApp and Facebook and YouTube are the primary reasons they're coming online- Nandagopal Rajan
"Here you have people who have no context of what [the] internet is. They have not seen a large screen device. They have not seen a smartphone before that," he said. "WhatsApp, and Facebook, and YouTube are the primary reasons they're coming online. For them, WhatsApp and Facebook are primarily content-consumption platforms."
Clearly, people in Canada, and all over the world, spread misinformation on social media even if they have been online for a long time, whether that's because it's been edited to mislead, or because it feeds our biases.
But there are things about WhatsApp, in particular, that make it a fascinating and sometimes tragic case study in unintended consequences of new technology.
Nobody thought that this end-to-end encrypted messaging platform would have two billion users- Nandagopal Rajan
WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted, which means that unlike Facebook and Twitter, they can't just monitor the content looking for false news or dangerous content, Rajan explained.
"Nobody thought that this end-to-end encrypted messaging platform would have two billion users [worldwide]. Have we ever seen any kind of encrypted platform at this scale?"