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The following editorial appeared in the Washington Post.
Facebook has an advantage in its fight against the misinformation that plagues its platform: the company can see the falsehoods.
This is not the case for WhatsApp, Facebook's online chat software, where messages are encrypted end-to-end – and where political missives promoting conspiracy theories are spreading to users in Brazil before the election. presidential election.
WhatsApp is immensely popular in Brazil. It is also full of lies. Folha's state-of-the-art outlet in São Paulo announced last week that companies had bought millions of dollars in email packages from blitz users with propaganda in favor of the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro.
Researchers who analyzed the 50 most widely shared WhatsApp images in Brazilian public discussion groups found that more than half were misleading or false.
Some messages differed from Bolsonaro's opponent as a Communist. False information has also tarnished Bolsonaro, for example by accusing him of having faked his stabbing at a campaign event.
WhatsApp fights against misinformation, but in many ways, the application is its own biggest enemy. WhatsApp presents itself as a private conversation place, offering the most important groups an intimacy that allows them to trust what they read. However, since these groups can hold 256 people and users can also send messages individually to 256 contacts at once, the bad actors can reach thousands of people by touching only a few keys on the screen. phone.
Meanwhile, end-to-end encryption prevents anyone, even WhatsApp staff, from seeing which messages travel the furthest and fastest.
Another shortcoming: Many mobile phone plans in Brazil include Internet access only to Facebook and WhatsApp, which means users may have trouble accessing news sites to get insight into storytelling stories. fishes.
Researchers have suggested solutions to preserve the integrity of Sunday's vote, including further lowering the number of times that a message can be transmitted, as has the company in India after that incendiary rumors about the application have resulted in crowd lynching during the summer. by limiting the number of contacts that a user can reach simultaneously.
The researchers also want WhatsApp to temporarily limit the size of the new groups in Brazil.
But introducing these changes so late in the game could slow down demystification efforts as misinformation spreads rapidly.
Rethinking WhatsApp around the world to reduce the reach of users or decrypt groups larger than a certain size could also have disadvantages: if WhatsApp gave up its features, another company could step in.
And in repressive countries, WhatsApp could offer civil society the opportunity to organize where the government can not spot dissent and shut it down.
WhatsApp must recognize that it is much more than the private messaging platform that its leaders are promoting. It's a publisher, just like its parent company and Facebook's peers.
It means taking responsibility for misinformation and the violence it facilitates.
There is no easy answer. But there could be a difficult one, and WhatsApp has to look for it.
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