In India, the fake news problem isn’t Facebook, it’s WhatsApp

Kathmandu/May 17, Ever since the news broke that a Russian troll factory used Facebook to spread misinformation during the 2016 US election, the social network has been a lightning rod for widespread concern about the problem of fake news, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories. But in many countries outside the US, the big problem isn’t what’s spreading on Facebook, but what’s being distributed via WhatsApp—the messaging software Facebook acquired in 2014 for $19 billion, which for many people in non-US countries provides a free alternative to text messaging. As The New York Times points out in a recent story:

“More than any other social media or messaging app, WhatsApp was used in recent months by India’s political parties, religious activists, and others to send messages and distribute news to Karnataka’s 49 million voters. While many messages were ordinary campaign missives, some were intended to inflame sectarian tensions and others were downright false, with no way to trace where they originated.”

The Times quotes a youth leader for one Indian political party who says he used WhatsApp to keep in touch with 60 voters he was assigned to track, sending them critiques of the government. But he also claims 23 activists were killed by jihadists—a report that has been proven false—and that a fake poll allegedly commissioned by the BBC predicted a win for his party. In the days before the recent election, the two leading parties said they had set up at least 50,000 WhatsApp groups to spread messages, including videos and fake news articles aimed at exploiting anti-Muslim sentiment.

According to a report from the Indian news site Financial Express, fabricated reports on WhatsApp of child abductions by immigrants have led to at least two attacks that resulted in innocent people being beaten by mobs and hanged. India is estimated to have more WhatsApp users than any other country, with about 200 million people using it at least once a month, out of a total of 1.5 billion monthly active global users, and the rate of adoption is still climbing, driven by the declining cost of smartphones and cellular data plans. The same phenomenon has been seen in Indonesia and Latin America.

Fact-checking groups working to debunk hoaxes and conspiracy theories in India say the spread of misinformation is increasingly happening on WhatsApp rather than Facebook or Twitter, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. “More than 90 percent of the stuff we are debunking is on WhatsApp,” said Govindraj Ethiraj, a journalist and founder of a fact-checking group called Boom. And because WhatsApp allows for anonymous accounts and uses end-to-end encryption, it can be almost impossible to determine where a rumor or hoax originated or how it spread so widely.

Here’s more on the problem of fake news outside the US and WhatsApp’s role in it:

A recent Washington Post article says many political activists in India are concerned the spread of fake news and hate speech on WhatsApp is affecting not just recent elections, but could impair the very functioning of democratic society. “It is getting out of hand, and WhatsApp doesn’t know what to do about it,” said Nikhil Pahwa, a digital rights activist. “The difficulty with WhatsApp is that it’s impossible to know how this information is spreading.”

The New York Times describes how the app has been used to spread rumors about alleged Muslim mob violence, including one report in which a video of a purported attack on a Hindu woman turned out to be video of an unrelated lynching in Guatemala. Messages spread by political parties have said the Indian elections represent a “war of faith.”

According to Indian news outlet NDTV, riots erupted in December after the body of a boy was found floating in a pond in the Karnataka region and reports spread on WhatsApp and Twitter that his body had been mutilated. The local police eventually released a forensic report noting that the reports were false, but the rumors continued.

On an Indian opinion site, an author and academic called for the government to consider regulating WhatsApp to prevent the spread of fake news and hate speech. The app has been blocked for short periods in both India and Brazil, where it has been criticized for not handing over data on users when ordered to do so. Facebook says it can’t provide data because the app is encrypted.