(This is a translated article. The Dutch original is here)
WhatsApp has a problem with fake news: the messages are encrypted, so nobody has any idea of what is going on – even WhatsApp doesn’t know. It’s good news if you appreciate your privacy and don’t want Mark Zuckerberg reading over your shoulder. However, the drawback is that there is no control over rumours spread by app groups and there is no authority to combat fake news with fact checkers in the way that Facebook does.
It can have drastic results. Unsubstantiated rumours can cause panic or mass hysteria and have already had fatal consequences in India: 46 people were killed and 43 wounded in the “WhatsApp lynchings” of 2017 and 2018, a series of lynchings that occurred after app groups spread fake news about kidnappings and paedophiles.
“People are happy with encryption”, explains researcher Simon Chauchard, who recently arrived at Leiden University to teach Political Sciences, “but it’s also a problem because rumours circulate without any form of control.”
He and his colleagues studied fake news on WhatsApp – research funded by Facebook – by testing the effectiveness of enabling users to point out fake news to each other among some five thousand Indian respondents. “Actually, there’s no other way of curbing fake news on WhatsApp except by users telling each other: ‘No, that’s not true.’
“The interesting thing is: lengthy corrections are not more effective than brief responses. It doesn’t matter how elaborate the correction is, not that lengthy corrections are common in actuality – people don’t bother to look for sources or write long answers. We can’t be bothered. But we’ve demonstrated that even if they did, it wouldn’t make any difference.
Red flag
“We recommend that WhatsApp makes it as easy as possible to call out fake news. One suggestion is some sort of doubt button, like the ‘like button’, which should be easy enough to arrange. At the moment, I’m experimenting with a button shaped like a red flag that I photoshop into it to see how people react.”
India has the most WhatsApp users in the world: Chauchard estimates that there are about four hundred million of them, a third of the population. “A hundred per cent of smartphone users have it and they’re on it all day long. The servers jam up every morning because everyone switches on at eight or half past eight. But WhatsApp is in trouble in India. They have a major problem with disinformation.” Some politicians are involved, but there are also rumours with “ethnic overtones” which sometimes incite violence.
It’s not surprising then that the idea of the doubt button was a hit on social media and on Indian news sites. “The study hasn’t been published yet”, Chauchard stresses, “but when we mentioned it on Twitter, it exploded. People were very enthusiastic: ‘Researchers found a way to cure WhatsApp!’, that kind of thing.”
“We’re not calling it a cure because it also means that people can say ‘this isn’t true’ about things that are right, and then we’re in even bigger trouble.”