By Newley Purnell

NEW DELHI-- Facebook Inc.'s WhatsApp took a step to stop the spread of suspect viral content ahead of India's national elections, launching a tip line there that enables users to point out dubious information for debunking.

In a first-of-its-kind effort for the messaging app, WhatsApp said Tuesday that it has partnered with an Indian startup called Proto to create a system in which users can forward suspicious messages they have received to an automated account. The account, called Checkpoint, will respond with an indication of whether the information is true, false, misleading, disputed, or "out of scope," WhatsApp said in a statement.

"The goal of this project is to study the misinformation phenomenon at scale--natively in WhatsApp," Proto's founders, Ritvvij Parrikh and Nasr ul Hadi, said in a statement.

Elections are set to begin next week.

The system can handle text, images and videos, and covers English and the local languages of Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam and Telugu.

Several messages submitted by The Wall Street Journal were acknowledged as received by the system, but three hours later there had been no determination of their veracity.

"If it is a known rumor, the user will get a quick response," a WhatsApp spokeswoman said. "If it is a new rumor, it will take some time for the verification center to determine if it can be verified."

The spokesman declined to provide a more specific time frame.

India is WhatsApp's largest market, according to research firm Counterpoint, with an estimated 300 million users, many of whom are accessing the internet for the first time on inexpensive smartphones.

After more than 20 people were killed last year in mob violence following false rumors spread via WhatsApp, the company made it harder to forward messages and limited the number of groups to which messages can be forwarded. But fact-checking groups and analysts say WhatsApp is still rife with misleading content as voters prepare to go to the polls, as The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

The Indian government has proposed rules that could force WhatsApp to root out culprits who are spreading untruths, but the Menlo Park, Calif. company says it is committed to ensuring users' privacy and that it is meant for individuals and small groups. Many Indian political parties often use WhatsApp to broadcast political messages to thousands of people at once, however.

Meanwhile, Facebook said Monday that it had removed hundreds of pages and accounts that it said were working in concert to propagate misleading information or spam ahead the elections. Some accounts were traced to employees of the Pakistani military's public-relations wing, Facebook said, while others were linked to an opposition political party. Facebook has more than 200 million users in India, among its largest markets.

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

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 02, 2019 06:39 ET (10:39 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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