E-mails obtained in a trial in the United States reveal that, in addition to expanding censorship on open platforms in the name of security in the pandemic, the American government also tried to moderate content about private communications on WhatsApp.
Journalist David Zweig examined the emails and described the content on the newsletters Substack. Days after Joe Biden’s inauguration as president, in January 2021, White House officials were already talking to Meta (parent company of Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp) to combat “vaccine hesitation”, the fear of taking vaccines against Covid-19. The big difference between WhatsApp and Meta’s other properties is that 90% of the communication in the application is between two people, according to the company’s own data.
In several emails, Rob Flaherty, White House director of digital strategy, talks to Meta executives about the actions taken. “What interventions have you done, which ones have you found that work and that don’t?”, he asked in March 2021. In the same message, Flaherty talks about “reducing harm” and “reducing people’s exposure” to information. “As we care about equity and access, WhatsApp is obviously a central part of that, given its reach in immigrant communities” and people of color, he commented.
Flaherty’s insistence was enough for a Meta employee to explain that WhatsApp is a private messaging service, and can only limit functions such as forwarding messages, without discriminating by content. The White House official replied that he was “well aware” of this and added a smiley emoji. The app applies the “forwarded too many times” label to viral messages and prohibits sharing them in more than one conversation at a time. This “is intended to reduce spread,” the Meta representative explained in the email. Users who mass mail or commit fraud are banned, “including those who seek to exploit misinformation about Covid-19”.
Flaherty’s emails pressing for further action on WhatsApp dated back to May 2021, when he said that Facebook “helped increase skepticism” against the 2020 presidential election and that it was on the social network that the 6 September insurrection took place. January was screwed. The content of the messages suggests that he was not acting alone, as he quotes other White House officials.
Zweig does not believe that Meta has given in to pressure: “targeted censorship in a private messaging application is still out of reach for the” American government, in the journalist’s opinion. WhatsApp collaborated during the pandemic with the World Health Organization, Unicef and more than a hundred governments and ministries of health to send messages about Covid and in favor of vaccines to users. More than three billion messages have been sent by chatbot programs.
The private messaging app has two billion monthly active users, ahead of Chinese alternatives like WeChat, which have around 1.3 billion, according to data curation site Statista. Meta’s social networks collaborated with Project Virality, a partnership between Stanford University, US government agencies and non-governmental organizations often financed with taxes. The Twitter Files revealed that the project recommended censoring information known to be true in the name of combating vaccine hesitancy.
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