The problem with fixing WhatsApp
Should the world worry about WhatsApp? Has it become a virulent new force in global misinformation and political trickery?
Or, rather, should the world rejoice about WhatsApp? After all, hasn’t it provided a way for people everywhere to communicate securely with encrypted messages, beyond the reach of government surveillance?
These are deep and complicated questions. But the answer to all of them is simple: Yes.
In recent months, the messaging app, which is owned by Facebook and has more than 1.5 billion users worldwide, has raised frightening new political and social dynamics. In Brazil, which is in a bruising national election campaign, WhatsApp has become a primary vector for conspiracy theories and other political misinformation. WhatsApp played a similar role in Kenya’s election last year. In India this year, false messages about child kidnappers went viral on WhatsApp, leading to mob violence that has killed dozens of people.
WhatsApp said it was working to reduce the spread of misinformation on the service. Critics charge that it is not doing enough — and there is some merit to their claims.
Unlike Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, WhatsApp isn’t a social network. It is mostly a bare-bones texting app in which most conversations are private and unmediated by any kind of algorithm meant to amp up engagement. This design means WhatsApp has little control over what content takes off and what doesn’t; in most cases, the company cannot even see what is happening on WhatsApp, because the service encrypts messages automatically.
That means the real problem may be something more fundamental — WhatsApp the idea. When you offer everyone access to free and private communication, lots of wonderful things may happen. But a lot of terrible things are bound to happen, too — and it might be impossible to eliminate the bad without muzzling the good.
In this light, WhatsApp is a powerful and permanent new reality and its problems aren’t likely to be solved as much as fitfully and sometimes unsatisfyingly managed. For better or worse, we are going to have to learn to live with it.
“I thought WhatsApp would be a very dark place, a wild place, where all these conspiracy theories would be spreading and we wouldn’t know what they were talking about,” said Yasodara Córdova, a fellow at DigitalHKS, a center at Harvard’s Kennedy School that examines the role digital technologies play in government. But what I learned is that the stories on WhatsApp are common to all the media here,” she said.
What sets WhatsApp apart is speed and reach, Córdova said. In Brazil, more than 120 million people use the service, which is offered free as part of mobile internet plans. As it does in its other big markets — India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia and much of Europe — WhatsApp functions in Brazil as an all-purpose communications tool. It is used for chatting and joking, for trading photos and memes, for news, for political activity and more.
This year, after the mob violence in India — another problem that existed before WhatsApp, and may simply have been amplified by the app — the company instituted rules to limit WhatsApp’s “virality.”
In the past, people could freely forward any WhatsApp message to anyone. Now they are restricted to forwarding a message to 20 people; in India the limit is five people. WhatsApp characterised these limits as an experiment. A spokeswoman told me that as the company learns more about how the limits affect users’ behaviour, it could introduce more fine-grained limits.
In an op-ed article in The New York Times last week, a group of Brazilian researchers called for WhatsApp to institute the Indian forwarding limit in Brazil to cut down on false news during the campaign. WhatsApp has declined to do so.
It is precisely WhatsApp’s close-knit sensibility that makes rumours on the service so pernicious. Familiarity on WhatsApp breeds trust, which most of the time is a pretty great social good. But in fast-moving situations with high stakes — natural disasters, wars, terrorist attacks or elections — trust on WhatsApp is turned on its head, becoming a key force behind viral falsity.