How is WhatsApp battling fake news?
Initiatives aim to show social media users how to spot misinformation
The video showed two helmeted men on a motorcycle circling a group of children playing cricket in the street. The motorcycle slowed, and the man in the back seat grabbed one boy and bundled him into his lap as the driver sped off.
Inside a college lecture hall, many of the 200 Indian students and law enforcement officers murmured in recognition. Asked how many had seen the video before, nearly half the students raised their hands.
The clip was part of an antikidnapping public service ad produced in next-door Pakistan. But with the ending edited out to make it appear like a real kidnapping, the footage went viral last year on WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging platform with more than 200 million users in India.
What happened next marked a shocking low in the era of fake news.
Users circulated the video along with unsubstantiated claims that child traffickers were running loose in Indian cities, triggering mob attacks that left at least two dozen people dead. The killings reverberated from India to Silicon Valley and forced WhatsApp to confront — far too late, critics say — the deluge of rumours, hoaxes and misinformation swamping its biggest market.
Battle against half-truths
As India heads into a bitter national election campaign involving parties that have frequently peddled half-truths and doctored videos, WhatsApp is mounting a battle against fake news — tinkering with its app, bolstering local factchecking organisations and airing national ads.
It has also launched an initiative to teach Indians how to become better social media users, spot hoaxes and keep from spreading them.
On an overcast morning in early January, that effort reached Assam, the northeastern state that saw one of the grisliest WhatsApp-related killings when two young Indian tourists were beaten to death in a remote hill district.
In an auditorium in the state capital, Guwahati, WhatsApp’s lime-green logo was emblazoned on a poster under the words “Fighting Fake News” — the title of a series of workshops the company is conducting in 10 states along with the Digital Empowerment Foundation, a New Delhi non-profit.
After screening the kidnapping video, Ravi Guria, the foundation’s deputy programme director, paced onstage and asked the room how a user could have determined it was fake.
Didn’t the ersatz closedcircuit footage look too crisp? Didn’t the accompanying tales of kidnapping gangs sound far-fetched, and warrant crosschecking with official sources or news websites?
“Just by sending one forward, we become part of the system that is perpetuating fake news in this country,” Guria said. “Before sending a message, we have to think of what kind of impact will it have on the person receiving it. We cannot wash our hands of this responsibility.”
These are fresh concepts in much of India, which has more new internet users than anywhere in the world. Over the next three years, the number of Indians online will increase by more than 58 per cent, to 762 million.
Most of the growth will come on smartphones hooked up to cheap data connections — and two out of three smartphones in India today use WhatsApp.
“If you ask someone if they access the internet, they’ll say no, but they will have WhatsApp,” said Govindraj Ethiraj, a TV journalist and founder of Boom, the Indian fact-checking website that first debunked the kidnapping video in 2017.
WhatsApp’s data show that Indians use the app differently from people in other markets — as much to share stories and images as to send private messages. India has one of the highest rates of forwarded messages of any country, meaning many users are passing around content that they didn’t write but originated somewhere else.
Take a vast pool of digital novices and a society that relishes storytelling and gossip, and add a largely hands-off approach from social media companies eager to dominate the world’s biggest remaining open market, and you get a country that is particularly susceptible to misinformation online.
“Fake news is part of our culture,” Guria said, wrapping up the two-hour workshop. “Technology has only intensified it.”
At the back of the room, Rifa Deka, a 22-year-old pursuing a master’s degree in mass communication, nodded. Her family members had seen the kidnapping video when it went viral last year, and while she didn’t know whether any of them had forwarded it, she often pointed out to her parents that sensational images flying around their WhatsApp groups had been edited or altered.
To cut down on potentially harmful content going viral, WhatsApp made changes to its app in India, allowing users to forward a message to a maximum of five chats at once. Company officials said forwarded content dropped by more than 25 per cent, and recently implemented the limit worldwide.
Since the mob killings, Indian regulators have warned WhatsApp and other social media companies that they could face legal action unless they act against false information.
Appeal by victim’s father
In a two-room house a few miles from where the workshop took place, Gopal Chandra Das, a retired auditor, sat in his living room next to a portrait of his son. A musician and aspiring designer with fuzzy dreadlocks, 29-year-old Nilotpal Das and his friend Abhijit Nath had travelled to a remote part of Assam last June when some agitated villagers pegged them for kidnappers, police said.
A mob gathered and attacked the pair with sticks and planks. Some recorded the beating on their phones. In one clip, Das is seen pleading: “Please, don’t kill me. I am Assamese.”
In the hours after their deaths, that video, too, went viral. The evidence helped police arrest 47 people, who are now facing trial for murder.
“What happened has happened,” Das said. “But WhatsApp and Facebook need to minimise fake news. What we went through — it should be the last incident like this.”
Just by sending one forward, we become part of the system that is perpetuating fake news in this country. Before sending a message, we have to think of what kind of impact will it have on the person receiving it. We cannot wash our hands of this responsibility.”
Ravi Guria | Deputy programme director, Digital Empowerment Foundation