It would be difficult to design a social platform more optimized for disinformation than WhatsApp. Even with the perks (being private, large-scale, and free) it comes with a corresponding downside.
Being end-to-end encrypted is a win for security, but it makes it impossible to see how disinformation is spreading through the system — whether to outside observers or Facebook-owned WhatsApp itself.
For spreaders of fake news, WhatsApp’s sheer scale makes it attractive, being free makes it accessible, and being both 1-to-1 (chats) and 1-to-many (groups) makes it potent. WhatsApp was very good at removing resistance in messaging – but so good that it also removed that friction for bad users.
This combination of resources led to him being blamed, at least in part, for a variety of sins related to incitement: lynching in India, panic during the lockdown in Australia and people being burned alive in Mexico.
WhatsApp has taken a number of steps to contain these issues, usually after a specific outrage has caught the world’s attention. Perhaps the most emblematic country is Brazil, where the use of WhatsApp is almost universal (80% of adults use it, more than any other platform) and its recent history is problematic.
It was a huge platform of disinformation in the 2018 presidential election, won by candidate Jair Bolsonaro. Research has shown that Bolsonaro supporters were almost twice as likely to use WhatsApp for news than his opponents. And the messages that appeared on the platform had a slant:
False rumors, manipulated photos, decontextualized videos and audio rumors have become campaign ammunition, going viral on the platform without being able to monitor their origin or full reach.
Many of the forgeries portray Haddad as a communist whose Workers’ Party would transform Brazil into another Cuba, convert children into homosexuals, and who planned to rig the polls.
Here’s what an academic study found:
From a sample of more than 100,000 political images that circulated in these 347 groups [de WhatsApp], we selected the 50 most shared. They were reviewed by Agência Lupa, one of Brazil’s leading checking agencies.
Eight of those 50 photos and images were found to be completely fake; 16 were real images, but used out of their original context or related to distorted data; 4 were unsubstantiated claims not based on a reliable public source. This means that 56% of the most shared images were misleading.
Only 8% of the 50 most shared images were considered completely true.
The vast majority of false information shared on WhatsApp in Brazil during the presidential election favored Jair Bolsonaro, according to an analysis of Guardian data.
In a sample of 11,957 viral messages shared in 296 group chats on the instant messaging platform during the campaign period, approximately 42% of items related to right-wing content contained information deemed false by verifiers. Less than 3% of the leftist messages analyzed in the study contained externally verified false information.
The numbers suggest that the spread of fake news was highly asymmetrical, accounting for much of the content disseminated by and for Bolsonaro supporters on WhatsApp.
Nearly half of right-wing posts flagged by verifiers “mentioned a fictitious plot to fraudulently manipulate the electronic voting system, echoing conspiracy theories promoted by Bolsonaro’s team and casting suspicion on the democratic process”. (Does this sound familiar, Americans?)
How did WhatsApp respond? Limiting the amount of message forwarding Brazilian WhatsApp users can do. Initially, users could forward a message to up to 256 groups at once; that number was reduced to 20 in 2018 and 5 in 2019, a measure tested for the first time after the violence in India. In 2020, the limit dropped to 1, but only for messages that had already been forwarded 5 or more times.
All of these moves have limited an individual’s ability to send a single spam message to many communities – and it appears to have worked in reducing the spread of misinformation.
By 2020, WhatsApp could announce, based on internal data, that message propagation “highly forwarded” dropped 70%.
(Of course, because they are encrypted, there is no way to know if messages are “highly forwarded” are false or not. Some kitten JPEGs were also undoubtedly limited in the process. But, as WhatsApp’s PR department said: “Are all referrals bad? Certainly not… However, we have seen a significant increase in the amount of referrals that users have told us may appear harmful and can contribute to the spread of false information. We believe it is important to slow the spread of these messages to keep WhatsApp a place for personal conversations.”)
And now, the restrictions are apparently getting even tighter. The news site covering WhatsApp WABetaInfo – there are niche markets everywhere! – noticed this in the beta released for iOS, having previously encountered it in an Android beta.
As you can see, it is no longer possible to forward forwarded messages to more than one group chat at a time and this is one more way to limit spam and misinformation. The new rules for forwarding messages only apply to messages that have already been forwarded.
This would mean that the restrictions previously imposed on messages “highly forwarded” would now apply to any previously forwarded messages.
Of course, this is just a beta version, which means the feature may change (or disappear) before it reaches the full user base. (I contacted WhatsApp to ask for more information and a spokesperson said they have nothing to share about the beta features). Hopefully this restriction will have a similar effect as the previous ones, reducing forwards and therefore misinformation (as well as cute cat videos).
Note that this change does not limit someone’s ability to forward the message to multiple different groups. This only makes it more difficult, forcing you to forward to each one individually instead of all with a single tap. It adds difficulty.
Most of the internet’s glories have been about downsizing. You can go to your local library to find out the height of the Empire State Building, but it’s much easier to check Wikipedia. You can find out who your high school crush ended up marrying, but Facebook makes it simple. You could express your thoughts on politics to a potential mass audience, but it usually requires buying a printer or being interviewed on TV. Blogs and social networks have made this almost hassle-free.
But it’s remarkable how many of the attempts to address disinformation (and improve civic information more broadly) are to intentionally increase the difficulty of propagating it. Want to tell your Facebook friends about how Dr. Is Fauci a Crypto-Nazi determined to kill all of his children? Facebook may now display a warning that tells you what you believe is incorrect. It may still allow you to post, but it won’t show the post to the same amount of friends as usual. Want to tweet an article you haven’t read yet? Twitter may kindly ask if you’d like to click on the link first – although that doesn’t stop you from not doing so.
Of course, there will be arguments about which are the correct impositions to add and which might be too burdensome or too restrictive of opinions, or particular actions. And not all of these restrictions work as well as expected, requiring a lot of testing and data. But restrictions like WhatsApp have the advantage of being content-neutral, while also aligning with the app’s DNA as a more personal and less pervasive chat platform. Amidst all the debates about de-platforming – which tend to involve individual users, often with their own fanbases – it’s also good to make room for more structural changes within a platform that can approach the problem from a different angle.
*Joshua Benton founded Nieman Lab in 2008 and served as director until 2020; he is now the senior writer for the Lab. Before spending a year at Harvard as a Nieman Fellow in 2008, he spent a decade in newspapers, most notably The Dallas Morning News.
The text was translated by Vitória Queiroz. Read the original text at English.
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