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Should the world worry about whatsapp? Has it become a new virulent force in global misinformation and political deception?
Or rather, should the world rejoice in WhatsApp? After all, has it not allowed people around the world to securely communicate with encrypted messages outside the reach of government oversight?
These are deep and complicated questions. But the answer to all is simple: yes.
The messaging application, which belongs to Facebook and has more than 1.5 billion users worldwide, has triggered a new political and social frightening momentum.
During the deadly election campaign of Brazil, WhatsApp became the main vector of conspiracy theories and political misinformation.
WhatsApp played a similar role during the Kenyan election last year. In India this year, fake messages about child kidnappers have become viral on WhatsApp, leading to mbad violence that has killed dozens of people.
WhatsApp said that she was working to reduce the spread of misinformation about the service. Critics argue that it's actually not enough – and their claims have some merit. Yet the deeper the problems are, the more intractable they may seem, even if society moved heaven and earth to solve them.
Unlike Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, WhatsApp is not a social network. It is mainly a text messaging application in which most conversations are private and do not use an algorithm designed to increase engagement. This design means that WhatsApp has little control over what takes off and what does not take off; in most cases, the company can not even see what is happening on WhatsApp because the service automatically encrypts the messages.
This means that the real problem may not be so much the WhatsApp company, nor the WhatsApp product, but something more fundamental: the idea of WhatsApp.
When you offer everyone access to free and private communication, many fantastic things can happen – and WhatsApp has been a boon to vulnerable populations such as migrants, dissidents and political activists. But a lot of terrible things will inevitably happen – and it might be impossible to eliminate the evil without muzzling the good.
With this in mind, WhatsApp is a powerful and permanent new reality and its problems will probably not be solved as well as mismanaged and sometimes poorly managed. For better or for worse, we will have to learn to live with it.
"I thought WhatsApp would be a very dark place, a wild place, where all these conspiracy theories would spread and we would not know what they were talking about," said Yasodara Córdova, a member of DigitalHKS, a Kennedy Center at Harvard A school that examines the role that digital technologies play in government.
Ms. Cordova worked on Comprova, a fact-checking project to monitor social media sites during the election of Brazil. "But what I've learned is that the stories on WhatsApp are common to all media here," she said.
What sets WhatsApp apart is speed and reach, Ms. Córdova said. In Brazil, more than 120 million people use this service, offered for free as part of mobile Internet packages (in other words, the use of WhatsApp does not count in the data rate of users).
As in its other major markets – India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia and in much of Europe – WhatsApp operates in Brazil as a versatile communication tool. It is used to chat and joke, to exchange photos and memos, for news, for political activities, etc.
Because of this centrality, Ms. Córdova said, the problems encountered on WhatsApp in Brazil were mainly related to the degradation of the country's political and media environment.
"For example, we do not really have public libraries in Brazil," she said. "We do not have a lot of sources of information about what people view as reliable.The lack of good sources of information reinforces their beliefs when they see something wrong on WhatsApp." or Facebook. "
Which is not to say that WhatsApp is without tools to curb the mess. This year, after the violence of the Indian crowd – another problem that existed before WhatsApp and which could have simply been amplified by the application – the company has put in place rules to limit the "virality" of WhatsApp .
In the past, people could freely transmit a WhatsApp message to anyone. Now they are limited to transmitting a message to 20 "chats", separate conversations with a person or group of up to 256 people. (There are six people in the middle group, said WhatsApp.) In India, WhatsApp has an even more restrictive transmission limit: five discussions.
It's precisely the welded sensitivity of WhatsApp that makes rumors about service so pernicious. Familiarity with WhatsApp breeds trust, which is mostly a very good social good. But in fast-paced situations – natural disasters, wars, terrorist attacks or elections – trust in WhatsApp is reversed, becoming a key force behind viral falseness.
The rumor says …
That was, at the very least, the conclusion of a 2016 study by Tomer Simon, a Tel Aviv University researcher, who was examining how people used the Internet in emergencies. .
His study focused on the kidnapping, in the summer of 2014, of three Israeli teenagers hitchhiking in the West Bank. The kidnapping has resulted in a huge incursion by the Israeli army into the West Bank. the boys were found dead two weeks later.
The Israeli army had instituted a gag order on press reports regarding the kidnapping, but on WhatsApp, the Israelis began circulating stories that "something" was happening. After careful research in the field, Dr. Simon collected and sought to identify the source of many rumors that spread on WhatsApp in the first hours after the kidnapping.
He traced the rumors to a surprising source: journalists and other civilians informed of the operation and who had used WhatsApp to disclose details to their families or to colleagues belonging to small groups that they badumed were private.
The story here is not malicious and blind rumors, said Dr. Simon. Rather, it is the story of a few people who trusted other people, who in turn trusted others, each of whom pbaded on what she saw as information. important and necessary to his friends and colleagues.
It's a story of human nature. And that is why, beyond learning to inhibit our natural tendency to share, it's hard to know what can be done to avoid false news on WhatsApp, aside from getting ready for more. NY TIMES
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