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WhatsApp Mail announced Friday to limit message transfers in India, a measure intended to curb the spread of false news that has caused a series of deadly violence in this Southeast Asian country.
Rumors on the net about the alleged presence of kidnappers cost Twenty people in lynchings by crowd in India in the last two months, according to a count of local media.
The situation is so resounding that the Indian government has threatened this week to continue the Facebook property platform , believing that as a conduit for false information it "can not escape its responsibility."
In response, the company announced that it was going to eliminate the possibility of transferring a message to several discussions at once. It will also test a limit of five transfers per message – as against twenty in the rest of the world.
The fast forwarding arrow next to messages containing media (photo, video, link) will also be removed.
With More than 200 million users out of 1.25 billion people, India is WhatsApp's largest market. Greetings, jokes, political propaganda: Indians receive a daily phenomenal number of messages and images, which they often relay to the rest of their repertoire.
Coupled with the recent arrival of the internet to the remote areas of country, this frenzy makes that unfounded rumors spread like wildfire. Just discovering these new technologies, a section of the population sometimes takes for granted all the content circulating there.
"We believe that these changes – which we will continue to evaluate – will help preserve the original purpose of WhatsApp : a private messaging application, "said the US technology group in a statement.
Under pressure from Indian authorities, WhatsApp had previously announced that the messages transferred would now be marked as such. It was previously unclear whether or not the sender was the author.
Mobile messaging also offered a press campaign in India and Pakistan to advise users on how to identify false information
"The fact that a message is shared many times does not make it true," said the advertisement spread over a full page in several newspapers.
– Technological Neutrality? –
Lynching caused by unfounded or malicious rumors is not a new phenomenon. But the democratization of the digital means of communication, which is rapidly penetrating Indian society, is accelerating the flow of information in a dizzying way.
Nearly half a billion Indians now have access to the Internet. And this number is growing fast thanks to cheap smartphones and mobile Internet prices among the lowest in the world.
The debate in India on the measures to adopt against the "fake news" circulating on WhatsApp s 'inscribed in a broader questioning of the neutrality of online platforms vis-à-vis the content posted there.
By the voice of his boss Marck Zuckerberg, Facebook has had to solemnly apologize to the world for its lack of responsiveness to false information, interference from abroad in election campaigns and leakage of personal data
Where does the responsibility of technology companies end and where does the public authorities start? In the case of lynchings, "you can shoot at the messenger but the primary responsibility for acting against the officials falls to the government," notes Indian commentator Paranjoy Guha Thakurta.
During the last lynching date caused by a circulating rumor On WhatsApp in India, a crowd of 2,000 people beat a 27-year-old computer engineer last week in the state of Karnataka, believed to be dealing with one of the kidnappers mentioned on the internet.
The deceased and his friends had just given chocolates to local children.
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