Death by WhatsApp ??

Read time =  2.5 minutes

The issue of ‘Fake News’ has reached a new level. In India, false rumours about child kidnappers have gone viral on WhatsApp, encouraging violent mobs to kill 24 innocent people since April.

The messages vary from worries over unknown visitors to towns and villages to the editing of a video showing a ‘child kidnapping’ which was actually part of a public service announcement in Pakistan.

Indian media and Government alike have been quick to blame WhatsApp (and therefore parent company - Facebook) for their role and lack of preventative actions around these shocking events.

The Home of WhatsApp 

In the last 4 years, social media usage in India has increased by 150% and smartphone ownership has rocketed. With this, over 250m Indians now use WhatsApp, making it their largest market globally. This is estimated to reach 450m in 2020.

And they use it a lot. In fact, WhatsApp struggles to cope each morning as millions of Indians send ‘Good Morning’ pictures to friends, family, and strangers. So many of these are sent that 1 in 3 smartphone users run out of space on their phones daily - encouraging Google to build an app that identifies these ‘Good Morning’ messages and deletes them.

WhatsApp’s continued expansion in these kinds of markets is important because it is crucial to justifying the $19bn Facebook paid for it in 2014. With competitors like WeChat, they are under pressure to dominate in emerging markets.

However, this has come at a time when millions of rural & poorly educated Indians are coming online for the first time. Social media has become popular in areas that have had no exposure to the concept of fake news or digital privacy.

Built for Fake News ??

WhatsApp has largely been missing from debates about ‘Fake News’, instead Facebook and Twitter have faced the most criticism. Nevertheless, its design makes it incredibly easy to spread false information, because:

1. Messages reach people faster with the popularity of groups
2. When messages are forwarded, there’s no indication of where they came from. Messages from those we trust bypass our ‘bullshit’ filter and we don’t examine them enough
3. It’s not only more private than other types of social media, but it is also encrypted which makes it hard for authorities to police (often until it is too late)

To combat these problems in India, WhatsApp is trialling a ‘Forwarded’ feature which marks messages from other people & has launched a newspaper campaign educating people about fake news. Is this enough? We’re not convinced.

Can WhatsApp be Blamed?

It needs to be made clear that, although the Indian Government & media place significant blame on WhatsApp, mob killings and social tensions were common before its arrival - it is far from clear that WhatsApp is causing a significant increase in either. Instead, it seems like a case of ‘technology is what we make of it’.

However, this issue highlights how Facebook is struggling to grapple with the downsides of their services in emerging economies. Only in March, the UN accused Facebook of playing a ‘determining role’ in the long-running violence against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar. Serious questions of what they can do to limit the negative effects have to be asked. 

This article was featured in The Grapevine on 20/07/18. If you want more stories like this delivered straight to your inbox each week, sign up here.