WhatsApp: Can It Fight Fake News?
WhatsApp is to the Brazilian election as Facebook is to the American one
The story is familiar — fake news, internet bots, and political interference — yet occurred under completely different pretenses and on a completely different platform.
During the 2018 election in Brazil, in which Bolsonaro — the current right-wing president of Brazil — emerged victorious, there were 1,690 active bots spreading fake news about Bolsonaro’s opposition. In fact, out of all right-wing viral messages about the election, 42% were shown to be fake, and the majority had been sent out by bots.
In one case, there was a viral photoshopped picture of opposition Manuela D’Avila’s shirt that was edited to say “Jesus is a transvestite.” Who knows how many times this photo was shared? WhatsApp is encrypted, which means we can’t track how many times a particular photo or text was forwarded, nor can we stop it from being exchanged. We do know, however, how immense the impact of these types of photos were.
WhatsApp is the essential communication method in Brazil. In a country of just over 200 million people, there are 120 million WhatsApp users. Many of these users, who have access to WhatsApp, do not have access to traditional media or fact checking, due to data plans in Brazil that allow for unlimited use of the messaging app but not the internet. This makes it such that WhatsApp is the primary news source for many Brazilians in the lower class.
Having WhatsApp as their primary means of information is detrimental because personal messages are harder to fact check, since they are, well, personal messages. They’re not publicized and, therefore, cannot be immediately identified as fake. And further, WhatsApp’s strict policy on the privacy of your messages via encryption makes the fact checking process even harder.
Due to the difficulty in monitoring the platform, many on the extreme right have taken advantage of WhatsApp. As traditional social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, continue to crack down on hate speech, the extreme right has flocked to the security of WhatsApp’s encryption. They use bots to add citizens into huge groups, of sometimes 100 or more people, and use these groups to spam messages.
You might be wondering how they find your number. Well, surprise surprise, from your Facebook profile. They use traditional social media to capture audiences for the personal messaging service. Once in these groups, bots can send about 14 messages in only 30 seconds — that’s 2,280 messages per hour.
It’s no surprise that for many, receiving so much positive information about Bolsonaro and so much negative information about the opposition could sway their political leanings. But what about WhatsApp makes it more believable?
Well, it’s a combination of many facts. First, since it’s a message sent to you, you’re more likely to open it. Then, if you know the sender, you’re more likely to believe that it is true, since that person seems to be vouching for the validity of this information.
Further, since you’re probably in contact and accept group invitations from those like minded, WhatsApp exacerbates confirmation bias by only showing you one side of the story. And lastly, information on a platform like WhatsApp gives you a feeling of having some sort of insider knowledge — something that mainstream media doesn’t even know yet.
So what can we do about it?
What happened in Brazil is not a unique occurrence. WhatsApp is global and so is its problem with fake news. Just in 2018, 25 people were lynched in India on account of fake news on WhatsApp. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, information spread in Kenya about fake deaths. And in Indonesia, it has similarly skewed political opinions during elections.
Because of these global occurrences, WhatsApp has started to make some positive changes to halt the spread of fake news. They’ve imposed a limit to how many people you can forward a message to; they’ve made it possible to see if a message was forwarded more than 5 times; they’ve published guides on how to spot fake news; and, in Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic, even set up a bot to help you figure out if sometime pertaining to the pandemic was misleading.
However, that’s mostly all they’ve done and all they probably can do. With WhatsApp’s encryption, there’s no way to impose fact-checking directly on the platform. It’s a double edged sword — while encryption provides privacy it also impedes us from further implementing measures to stop the spread of misinformation.
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All opinions and views expressed are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of humanID.
