[India’s “WhatsApp First” election, as it has been dubbed, comes at a time when parent company Facebook has been accused of undermining democracy by failing to control hate speech, Russian disinformation and inaccurate news. In developing countries such as Burma and Sri Lanka, false stories on Facebook have sparked riots, lynchings and religious violence. In the United States, accounts run by Russian operatives shared disinformation and divisive messages to up to 126 million people.]
By Annie Gowen and Elizabeth
Dwoskin
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A police officer stands
guard as supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party hold
their cellphones and
shout slogans during a campaign rally addressed by
Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi in Bangalore
on May 8. (Aijaz Rahi/AP)
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MANGALORE,
India — Forget debates and
rallies. Elections in India are now fought and won on WhatsApp, the
Facebook-owned messaging app that is used by millions of people here to make
calls, chat and share information.
But the service is also providing an
unfiltered platform for fake news and religious hatred, activists and observers
say.
In a high-profile state election here this
month, seen as a preview of India’s national election next year, the country’s
two major political parties claimed they amassed more than 20,000 WhatsApp
groups, boasting they could each reach more than 1.5 million loyalists in
minutes. But some of those messages have been false and inflammatory, twisting
the words of political opponents and ratcheting up tensions between Hindu
nationalists and the country’s Muslim minority.
India’s “WhatsApp First” election, as it has
been dubbed, comes at a time when parent company Facebook has been accused of
undermining democracy by failing to control hate speech, Russian disinformation
and inaccurate news. In developing countries such as Burma and Sri Lanka, false
stories on Facebook have sparked riots, lynchings and religious violence. In
the United States, accounts run by Russian operatives shared disinformation and
divisive messages to up to 126 million people.
But activists in many parts of the world say
WhatsApp — used by 1.5 billion people globally and known for its encrypted
messages that even company executives can’t read — presents an even greater
challenge to democracy.
The platform is ripe for abuse because so
many of its users are new to the Internet and not digitally literate, activists
say. And because conversations happen within private groups, it can be
difficult for the broader public to correct false information.
“It is getting out of hand, and WhatsApp
doesn’t know what to do about it,” said Nikhil Pahwa, a digital rights
activist. “The difficulty with WhatsApp is that it’s impossible to know how
this information is spreading. It’s very easy for a political party to spread
misinformation and no one can trace it back to them.”
WhatsApp is not as widely used in the United
States, and when Facebook purchased it in 2014, observers were shocked by its
$19 billion price. But chief executive Mark Zuckerberg coveted WhatsApp because
of its global reach: It has greater penetration than Facebook in parts of the
world.
In places such as Brazil and Mexico, the app
is the most common service not only for texting and calling between friends and
family but also for businesses — from doctors to hair salons to news
organizations — to communicate with clients.
WhatsApp’s largest market is India, where it
has more than 200 million users. Indians sent each other more than 20 billion
New Year’s Eve greetings via WhatsApp this year. And WhatsApp is testing a new
payments feature to expand its reach.
Almost from the beginning, WhatsApp messages
have been used to incite mob violence in India. WhatsApp rumors about child
abductions led to the murder of three people in Tamil Nadu state in the past
two weeks.
In India’s election, Facebook has teamed with
the fact-checking website Boom to review related content. Yet little has been
done in this cycle to combat incendiary content on WhatsApp. Representatives of
the messaging service were in India in recent days to meet with civil society
groups and discuss next year’s election.
“We’re working to give people more control
over groups and are constantly evolving our tools to block automated content,”
according to a WhatsApp statement, which noted that users can already block a
phone number with just one tap. “In the run-up to next year’s election in
India, we’re stepping up our education efforts so that people know about our safety
features, as well as how to spot fake news and hoaxes.”
Facebook executives have clashed with
WhatsApp’s leadership on a host of issues, including privacy and how to profit
off WhatsApp’s broad base of users. Its co-founder, Jan Koum, resigned last month
in part over Facebook’s attempts to collect more detailed information. In turn,
Facebook executives have been frustrated over WhatsApp’s inability to stem the
tide of fake news or control illegal content shared on the platform.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who
marched to victory in 2014 backed by an unprecedented social media operation,
has thousands of WhatsApp warriors running grass-roots groups. A review of
their posts show some contain warnings about Muslims — a tactic to unite the
loyal Hindu base.
“Reaching out to each home and promoting
one’s manifesto is easier and faster than ever before,” said Vikas Puttur, a
spokesman for Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in Mangalore. “We get to know the
ground reality in moments.”
Mangalore is a tidy city of about 625,000
people in the state of Karnataka, with palm trees and terra-cotta-roof homes.
But its languid seaside air is belied by strains between majority Hindus and a
largely affluent Muslim minority, many of whom have embraced a stricter form of
Islam fostered by ties to the Persian Gulf.
Puttur, 32, a polished MBA with roots in
India’s Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, denied that the party
spreads fake or religiously tinged material but said its main opponent, the
Congress party, does. Congress denies this, but its supporters have spread fake
news about a BJP worker arrested with millions for voter payouts, among other
falsehoods.
Puttur played a widely circulated video of a
Muslim politician from the opposing party, Zameer Ahmed Khan, translating
Khan’s fiery speech as a pledge to “butcher all the Hindus.”
In fact, according to an analysis by the
fact-checking website Alt News, Khan said, “If I am made a minister, in five
years I will do such work that my name will appear in the Guinness record.” Alt
News found that fake news had spiked from all political parties but “misinformation
that is spread by BJP supporters on social media is often communal in nature.”
Asked about this discrepancy, Puttur said, “I
have told you what he actually meant.”
Indian officials, feeling helpless to stop
the spread of WhatsApp content, have resorted to shutting the Internet down in
tension-filled places, with more than 70 stoppages last year compared with six
in 2014, according to the Internet Shutdowns tracker portal.
Brazil has also shut down the service
periodically, after company executives refused to share data requested by
authorities.
Other countries are experimenting with how to
monitor WhatsApp content.
In Colombia, a news website called La Silla
Vacía launched a “WhatsApp Detector” last year, allowing users to submit
WhatsApp messages to be fact-checked. Hotlines have been established by
activists in Mexico and by the Egyptian government, enabling people to report
stories they think are false or, in the case of Egypt, that endanger “the
nation’s security or public interests.”
The WhatsApp statement said that if there is
a safety concern, the company may be able to block bad actors on its platforms.
While executives cannot scan content, they can view phone numbers and profile
photos and connect WhatsApp accounts with Facebook accounts to gather clues
about unwanted activity, such as terrorism, child pornography and spam. They
are looking to do more in the future, it said.
“Political parties in India have been using
WhatsApp to organize for some time,” the statement said. “This has all been
done without help from WhatsApp. The Karnataka election is teaching us more
about what’s happening and how to help prevent spam more effectively.”
In early December, in the coastal town of
Honnavar in Karnataka, the body of Paresh Mesta, an 18-year-old fisherman’s
son, was found floating in a pond. Police believe he was swept up in a clash
between Muslims and Hindus at a local temple.
Rumors — repeated by prominent members of the
BJP — quickly spread on WhatsApp that the boy’s body had been mutilated, and
riots broke out.
“When he was found, he was mutilated,
castrated, burnt by boiling oil poured over his head & his head split
dastardly with a weapon,” Shobha Karandlaje, a BJP member of Parliament,
tweeted on Dec. 10. The state BJP issued a statement repeating Karandlaje’s
claims that militant “elements” killed Mesta, and accused police of a coverup.
Police took the unusual step of releasing the
forensic examiner’s response to these charges, who noted two abrasions that may
have been the result of “blunt force trauma” but no other injuries. A religious
tattoo said to have been scraped from his body was intact.
In the small fishing village where Mesta’s
grieving parents live, young men crowded around to show WhatsApp forwards they
had received that fueled their anger — Karandlaje’s posts, as well as a grisly
video one onlooker took of Mesta’s blackened body as it was pulled from the
pond.
Police ultimately arrested five Muslim men in
the case, which was turned over to India’s Central Bureau of Investigation, and
later filed a complaint against Karandlaje for provoking enmity between
religious groups. She declined to comment, but on social media vowed to
continue her fight with the hashtag #HinduLivesMatter.”
Dwoskin reported from San Francisco.
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