Victoria Grand: "We will block WhatsApp accounts that send large messages"

Only in Brazil,

WhatsApp

he blocked more than 400,000 accounts before the presidential elections that delighted Jair Bolsonaro. Motivation? Use the messaging service as a political broadcast channel or, even worse, voter misinformation. It is there that all sorts of false news circulated. And while WhatsApp defends its action and claims that there is no clear evidence that what has happened through the app has defined the Brazilian breed, it now prefers to prevent. A very tight vote announces in Argentina and he took the initiative.

"WhatsApp is not a tool for doing politics," repeats as WhasApp's most senior policy and communications mantra in the world, Victoria Grand, who resides in San Francisco, United States. but whose presence in Argentina is a message yes He went to Buenos Aires to explain the company's position, expose what they learned from the Brazilian experience and others elections in India, Spain and Indonesia, and anticipate some new developments aimed at reducing the spread of information.
false news elections via the application.

"The presidential election in Argentina is without a doubt the most important one we will face on WhatsApp in the second half of this year," said Grand, in a solo interview with
THE NATION, which oscillated between Spanish and English. Daughter of an Argentine and American diplomat, Grand grew up in Buenos Aires, but settled in Wisconsin, being very small. "My Spanish is that of an 8-year-old girl," he apologizes, during one of two times when he opened a window on his personal life. L & # 39; other? He said that he knew how difficult the choice was. "Part of my family constantly reminds me," he laughs.

Immediately, Grand defends the restrictions on mbad distribution that WhatsApp has incorporated in recent years. Since then, all forwarded messages are tagged in this way in the reduction to five groups or contacts of the option to forward messages. According to him, only this last action has reduced by 25% the number of messages circulating on WhatsApp, about 1,000 million fewer messages per day. "It's a deliberate decision to reduce our" virality "because it's not our goal, our service is not a social network, it's a private messenger."

– Why are you here? If everything went well in Argentina, you would be in San Francisco today, not in Buenos Aires …

-We are here to start early to talk about how we are preparing for the presidential elections. Among other things, this implies that we identify and block, with the National Chamber, accounts that send messages en mbade. People use WhatsApp to share what matters most to them, including their political preferences. But our message is that WhatsApp is not a tool for doing politics. We do not sell political ads and when we find that parties or campaign teams send mbadive or automated messages, we block these accounts.

-If you can not access message content for privacy reasons, how do you detect people to block?

– Investigate patterns of behavior. Today, 90% of the messages sent by WhatsApp do it from one person to another, although we all belong to different groups, which tend to be less than ten people. In other words, from the way it is used, WhatsApp looks more like sending SMS or Gmail than a social network.

-What type of "behavioral patterns" do you badyze?

-For example, how many times per hour and per day a user sends messages, at what time and what reciprocity is received. Does it send only messages or does it receive and interact with its recipients as well? Do you send your messages to people on your calendar or who are not contacts? Do you receive many reports and reports? Is it a person who sends messages only to groups or even to individuals? With these models, among others, we are blocking two million accounts a month, even though it is also true that, while improving our detection techniques, they are also improving their techniques to escape us.

-What happens if they find that consulting companies and companies are promoting their mbad messaging services through WhatsApp to their customers, that it is about candidates or governments?

– This happened to us in Brazil and we ordered to stop promoting these alleged services. Otherwise, we cancel your accounts.

-WhatsApp offers business services to political parties or campaign teams?

-No, it is strictly forbidden. Some municipal services have been activated in pilot testing only in a few cities and this only works if users take the initiative because they are interested. But we do not provide any services to candidates.

– Do you think Argentina can follow the steps of what happened with WhatsApp in Brazil?

– In Brazil, we had blocked more than 400,000 accounts before the elections, but we still have no evidence of the real impact of what WhatsApp pbaded on in the election results. We are convinced that many factors have influenced.

-But they incorporated the changes in the application and anticipate the others …

-Yes, we have reduced the number of references to 5 contacts, whether individuals or groups, but we have also incorporated the tag "returned" and we will add in the weeks to come a control of the Privacy allowing users to ask them to add to a group, in addition to other improvements that we are preparing and hope to launch before the August primary elections. Today, I can tell you that our best engineers are dedicated to solving these problems.