Checking fake news

WhatsApp is taking welcome steps to contain the menace

The instant messaging service, WhatsApp, is often accused of being a major carrier of fake news and rumours. It is now setting in place new measures to curtail the spread of fake news during the pandemic. Stemming the flood of lies is absolutely vital. False cures, communal hatred directed at specific communities, and fear-mongering about transmission rates have already led to many unpleasant incidents. This is additional stress for overburdened administrations to deal with. Even as it is putting new fact-checking protocols in place, WhatsApp has drastically limited the number of times a message can be forwarded. It is now beta-testing ways to encourage users to flag frequently forwarded content and send it for fact-checking and authenticity.

The Facebook-owned platform holds an overwhelming market share in India, where it is installed on over 400 million of India’s 500 million smartphones. It is not surprising that there has been a sharp rise in message volumes, given that social media usage in general has jumped. According to Google Trends, people stuck at home were spending 280 minutes a day on social media in the first week of lockdown, which was far more than the 150 minutes spent, earlier in March.

The limit on forwards should help to slow the “infection rate”, in analogy with social distancing. Until July 2019, WhatsApp messages could be forwarded at one go to 256 different groups, which could each contain 256 different accounts. That limit was cut to 20 forwards at one go in July 2019 and is said to have helped. WhatsApp claims that the 20-forward limit brought down the global volume of forwards by 25 per cent. On Tuesday, the limit was further reduced. After a message had been forwarded five times, it is classified as a frequent forward and can only be pushed out to one account at a time. This limit is actually easily circumvented: Any message may be pushed out again and again, if the user is prepared to select recipients one by one. But behavioural scientists claim, and the data does suggest, that this will slow the pace of forwards. It must be noted that a given message could still be pushed out to five groups of 256 users each at the first go, and that is a considerable audience. The limit is also content-agnostic. It doesn’t discriminate on the basis of the content itself, which may be true or fake. The platform merely counts the number of times a message has been forwarded. However, WhatsApp is now testing a new feature to allow users to search Google to determine if the content of a given message is authentic or fake.

This is a pro-active concept. Users who used this search and authenticate feature could then choose to delete fake news, and warn others in their networks. This does require the user to actually use the new search and authenticate feature. It is difficult to predict how popular that feature will be until it is rolled out for everyone. Fake news is a menace in the best of times and it is a clear danger during a public health emergency of the kind that the world is facing today. It is hard for an end-to-end encrypted platform like WhatsApp to monitor content flowing on the network. Putting limits on forwards does constrain the “infection rate” and giving users a tool to aid in content authentication could also be a boon.