Whatsapp Newspaper Ad Fake News 2018
These days the topic of fake news is being discussed a lot in India. Unfortunately, people are believing false news which resulted in the lynching in India (see this & this)
Many articles have been written on the topic of Whatsapp and fake news in India,
There are many messaging apps being used in India – Whatsapp, Telegram, Hike, Signal, Facebook Messenger. Whatsapp is the king of all these messenger apps in India. Whatsapp caught on mainly due to its simplicity, very smooth to use, users see very less friction to use it.
The business use cases of Whatsapp in India is very interesting – matrimonial brokers, interior decorators, wedding event organizers, priests, they use Whatsapp to conduct their entire business.
Recently I wrote on two topics, a false narrative is more dangerous than fake news and how social media was fueling the reach of fake news (and disinformation).
With General Elections in India to be held in 2019, we can expect fake news to be on the rise. Other countries are facing the same problem during election time.
WhatsApp has about 200 million users in India. According to Chris Daniels, CP Whatsapp, 90% of messages sent on WhatsApp are between 2 people and the majority of groups have less than 10 people. I suspect a majority of these 10-member Whatsapp groups are named “family” which only have the immediate family members.
Whatsapp carried full-page ads in English and few regional language newspapers. Basically, they relied on offline media to talk about an online product. I didn’t see any online campaigns from Whatsapp to educate users about fake news.
And do people really understand what was being said in the print ad (image)?
| Whatsapp Tells User To | Me Reads It As.. |
|---|---|
| Understand when a message is forwarded | 90+% of users just forward a message. They want to be the first one to forward. |
| Question message that upsets you | Yes, I question it and I want more people to know why I am upset. Hence I forward the message! |
| Check information that seems unbelievable | Now only if we were that intelligent. |
| Look out for messages that look different. Fake news usually have spelling mistakes | Seriously? |
| Check photos in messages carefully. Look online for where the image came from | On a mobile I need to save the image. Upload the image to Google or tineye.com. Do you expect all your users to do that? |
| Check links (URLs) | People cannot detect suspicious links. (Whatsapp is adding the feature of warning the user of suspicious links, a good start) |
| Use other sources. Check if other websites have the same news. | Instead, I would check 'fact checking sites' such as Boomlive.in to see if they have flagged this story. But again, I am a techie and internet savvy, majority are not. So they won't bother to check the veracity. So they will just Forward, damage done. |
| Be thoughtful of what you share. If you are not sure, don't share. | Yes, this is a useful tip. |
| Fake news goes viral. If the same message is seen on many groups it need not be true. | Yes, this is a useful tip. |
And why can’t Whatsapp send an educating message, warning message about fake news to its user base periodically? And if they do, let it not be in English and Hindi only, there are other Indian languages too.
Blaming an Admin of Whatsapp group for the posting of an offensive message or fake news is not right. Reason: What can an Admin really do after such a message was posted? Nothing (more on that later).
At times you become the Admin of the group unknowingly and it can get you into trouble.
In my college Whatsapp group, they made all members as Admins, so we ALL go behind bars together. First, we were classmates, later we may be cellmates.
Blaming Whatsapp alone is not correct. The users play a big role in spreading fake news. We can expect to see a lot more of this as General Elections 2019 is not too far off. Bring in tough laws which will deter many to take part in sharing the unconfirmed news.
The government has to set up special courts to handle digital related cases and fast-track the hearing and judgments. Currently, important cases are being heard after a delayed period.
Media is writing about lynching but selectively. Unfortunately, the religion of the victim is the deciding factor for the amount of coverage. A victim is a victim, a murderer is a murderer, they have nothing to do with religion.
Twitter can identify tweets that are going viral, this is easy for them to do as tweets are public (even if your account is private, Twitter’s engine can see your messages). The same logic can be applied to Facebook. However, this is not the case with Whatsapp, the message is encrypted and even Whatsapp cannot view your message, this is the main reason why Whatsapp got popular.
Whatsapp needs to have a way to identify hate messages, viral messages (text, video, image) to save lives. Their algorithms must be trained to handle multiple Indian languages, else it will not be that effective. This comes at the cost of privacy. If there are tight internal controls within the Whatsapp organization, we can & should trade privacy for lives.
WhatsApp is donating $50,000 to 20 researcher projects (3 in India), a total of $1 million, for misinformation research. WhatsApp will not provide any user data to researchers.
Whatsapp and its users have to do a lot more to curtail Fake News.
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