META Meta Platforms Inc

By Newley Purnell 

NEW DELHI -- In India, viral fake news is lighting up Facebook Inc.'s WhatsApp messaging app as the world's biggest democracy prepares for national elections in the coming weeks.

Efforts by WhatsApp and the government to stop the spread of misinformation are having little effect, according to fact-checking groups and analysts.

That is a challenge for Facebook, as well as policy makers and voters grappling with digital falsehoods in India, a country of 1.3 billion people where mobile internet access has exploded in recent years.

It also provides a unique window on how Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg's surprising strategic shift from public postings to private messaging could play out around the world. Mr. Zuckerberg said in March that Facebook would move to a model favoring encrypted group chats like those on WhatsApp, which is popular in emerging economies including Brazil and Indonesia.

India is WhatsApp's biggest market. Research firm Counterpoint estimates it has 300 million users, making it bigger here than Facebook. WhatsApp hasn't released user figures since February 2017, when it said it had 200 million users in India. Since then, plummeting prices for mobile data and inexpensive smartphones have made WhatsApp the default digital town square in a country with deep societal divides.

India's political parties often employ WhatsApp to blast tailored political messages to tens of thousands of WhatsApp groups they have created. The groups are often organized by caste, income level and religion, said Shivam Shankar Singh, a University of Michigan graduate who worked as a data consultant for the country's ruling party. He resigned last year, citing the party's spreading of fake news as a reason.

"India is now the world's cheapest country to spread fake news," said Counterpoint analyst Tarun Pathak. Many of the new users getting online are in rural areas, with limited digital literacy, and are using mobile phones that cost as little as $20, he said.

Among the WhatsApp messages that have taken off in recent weeks is footage from a videogame falsely purporting to show Indian warplanes blowing up a building across rival Pakistan's border. Other images have shown people who died in a heat wave passed off as dead militants.

WhatsApp users have also shared messages falsely claiming that the father of a captured Indian Air Force pilot had joined an opposition political party. Others are more prosaic but potentially problematic, such as a graphic showing inaccurate dates for the coming polls.

"In the last year misinformation has migrated from Facebook to WhatsApp, " said Govindraj Ethiraj, a journalist and founder of popular fact-checking website Boom, which Facebook itself has enlisted as a partner to debunk bogus claims that go viral.

Last year, Mr. Ethiraj's group received about one dozen tips a day from volunteers highlighting hoaxes coming from WhatsApp. They now number in the hundreds each day, he said, with WhatsApp's opacity and ubiquity aiding their spread.

WhatsApp, which Facebook acquired in 2014 for $22 billion, has tweaked its app to try to prevent false news from going viral. It maintains that the app isn't meant for the bulk sending of messages.

"The WhatsApp team has made substantial changes to the platform specific to India," said Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook's director of product management for civic integrity. He referred questions about the prevalence of false news on the platform to WhatsApp.

A person familiar with WhatsApp's thinking said it is monitoring coordinated abuse as elections approach, and that the company considers false news a challenge to all technology platforms, not solely WhatsApp. The firm says it removes more than two million suspicious accounts globally a month, though it doesn't break out the number in India.

Some 64% of Indians say they encounter fake news, higher than the global average of 57%, according to a Microsoft Corp. survey. Meanwhile, 52% of people surveyed in the South Asian nation say they get news from WhatsApp, significantly higher than most European countries and the U.S., according to a March report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and the University of Oxford in England.

Conventional text messages are typically sent between individuals or small groups, incur a small cost to senders, and can be accessed when needed by authorities. WhatsApp allows groups of up to 256 people to easily exchange words, videos and images for just fractions of a penny, or for free if connected to Wi-Fi. The content is encrypted, unreadable in transit, and cannot be seen by authorities, or WhatsApp itself, the company says.

With a few clicks of a button, WhatsApp users can forward content to more than 1,200 people. However, unlike when material is posted to Facebook or Twitter Inc., the origin of a WhatsApp message can become unclear once it has been forwarded.

After more than 20 people were killed last year in India in mob violence following false rumors spread through the app, WhatsApp limited the number of groups to which messages can be forwarded to five. It also labeled forwarded messages as such and has made users click extra buttons to send them. The company has also launched offline educational campaigns -- such as one called "Share joy, not rumors" -- to dissuade users from sharing misinformation.

Analysts say WhatsApp's educational and technical efforts don't appear to be working. "I don't see any change," said Pratik Sinha, co-founder of fact-checking website Alt News.

Even the fact-checking groups' work has limited impact, said Vidya Narayanan, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute who has studied misinformation in India. That is because their corrections to viral messages typically aren't seen until days after fake news has been widely disseminated and absorbed by citizens.

Meanwhile, the Indian government has proposed guidelines that would force WhatsApp to break its encryption to hunt down those who send objectionable content. WhatsApp says it is committed to maintaining encryption to protect users' privacy.

Write to Newley Purnell at newley.purnell@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 31, 2019 14:18 ET (18:18 GMT)

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