According to the foundation, despite WhatsApp having almost twice as many users as Facebook, Meta focuses most of its election-related activities on Facebook.
Elections will be held in 64 nations, including significant democracies such as the United States of America and India, in 2024, with a total of four billion people, which is approximately half of the world’s population. When it comes to the discourse and factual claims that are made on their platforms, social media firms like as Meta, YouTube, and TikTok have pledged to defend the integrity of those elections. At the very least, this is the case. On the other hand, the closed messaging software WhatsApp, which is now on par with public social media platforms in terms of both scale and reach, is not being discussed. Researchers at Mozilla, a nonprofit organization, are concerned about this absence.
“Nearly ninety percent of the safety interventions pledged by Meta ahead of these elections are focused on Facebook and Instagram,” Odanga Madung, a senior researcher at Mozilla who focuses on elections and platform integrity, said in an interview with Newtechmania. What is the reason that Meta has not made a public commitment to a public road map that outlines the specific measures it will take to safeguard elections within WhatsApp?
WhatsApp has been the primary method of communication for the majority of people outside of the United States over the course of the past ten years. In 2014, Meta (which was then known as Facebook) purchased WhatsApp for a total of $19 billion. WhatsApp made the announcement in the year 2020 that it has more than two billion users all over the world. This staggering number surpasses the user base of any other social or messaging app, with the exception of Facebook itself.
When it comes to election-related safety measures, Meta has primarily concentrated its attention on Facebook, despite the fact that it is a massive platform. Despite the fact that Facebook had issued 95 policy announcements relating to elections since 2016, the year when the social network came under attention for helping to propagate fake news and nurture extreme political views, the study conducted by Mozilla revealed that Facebook had made that number of announcements. Only 14 were made via WhatsApp. As a point of contrast, Google and YouTube each made 35 and 27 announcements, whereas X and TikTok each made 34 and 21 announcements respectively. According to what Madung said in the report, “From what we can tell from its public announcements, Meta’s election efforts appear to prioritize Facebook by an overwhelming margin.”
When it comes to the functionality of WhatsApp during election days, as well as in the months leading up to and following elections in a country, Mozilla is now requesting that Meta make significant adjustments. The addition of disinformation labels to viral content (such as “Highly forwarded: please verify” rather than the current “forwarded many times”), the restriction of broadcast and Communities features that allow users to send messages to hundreds of people at the same time, and the encouragement of users to “pause and reflect” before forwarding anything are some of the measures that are being taken. According to a spokeswoman for the firm, more than 16,000 individuals have placed their signatures on Mozilla’s pledge, which requests that WhatsApp reduce the dissemination of political disinformation.
The first time WhatsApp began to implement friction into its service was after a string of lynchings that were inspired by misinformation that went viral on the site resulted in the deaths of scores of people in India, which is the company’s largest market. Among these measures were the restriction of the number of individuals and groups to which users could forward a piece of content, as well as the usage of labels that read “forwarded” to differentiate communications that had been forwarded. Addition of a “forwarded” label was a measure taken to restrict the spread of disinformation; the assumption was that individuals would be more likely to view content that had been forwarded with greater skepticism.
When it comes to the context of disinformation, “someone in Kenya, Nigeria, or India who is using WhatsApp for the first time is not going to think about the meaning of the ‘forwarded’ label,” Madung added. Indeed, it is possible that it will have the opposite effect, which is that something has been widely disseminated, which means that it must be trustworthy. It is well acknowledged that social evidence is an essential component in determining the trustworthiness of a certain object in many communities.
One of the features that Twitter once added was a feature that pushed users to actually read an item before retweeting it if they hadn’t opened it first. This function gave rise to the concept of asking people to take a moment to pause and consider. A forty percent increase in the number of individuals opening articles before retweeting them was reported by Twitter as a result of the prompt.
Additionally, the request that WhatsApp temporarily block its broadcast and Communities functions was prompted by worries regarding the capabilities of these services to send messages, whether they are forwarded or not, to thousands of users all at once. The statement made by Madung was that “they are attempting to turn this into the next big social media platform.” With that being said, without taking into account the implementation of safety mechanisms.
“WhatsApp is one of the only technology companies to intentionally constrain sharing by introducing forwarding limits and labeling messages that have been forwarded many times,” a spokeswoman for WhatsApp told Newtechmania. “WhatsApp is currently one of the most popular messaging apps in the world.” “We have developed new tools that equip users with the ability to seek accurate information while simultaneously protecting them from unwanted contact. These tools are detailed on our website.”
Based on the findings of research that Mozilla conducted in Brazil, India, and Liberia about platforms and elections, the business made the demands that it did. The former are two of WhatsApp’s most important markets, whereas the majority of Liberia’s population lives in rural areas with little internet connectivity, which makes it practically impossible to conduct standard online fact-checking. Mozilla discovered that political parties in all three countries were heavily utilizing the broadcast capability of WhatsApp in order to “micro-target” voters with propaganda and, in some instances, hate speech.
The encrypted nature of WhatsApp makes it impossible for researchers to monitor what is circulating within the ecosystem of the platform. Despite this constraint, some researchers are still attempting to monitor what is going on within the ecosystem. In the year 2022, two academics from Rutgers University, Kiran Garimella and Simon Chandrachud, traveled to India to visit the headquarters of political parties. While there, they were successful in persuading authorities to include them in the 500 WhatsApp groups that they administered. The information that they obtained served as the foundation for a paper that they wrote and won an award for. The title of the study was “What circulates on Partisan WhatsApp in India?” Despite the fact that the findings were unexpected — Garimella and Chandrachud discovered that hate speech and misinformation did not, in fact, constitute the majority of the content of these groups — the authors made it clear that their sample size was small, and it is possible that they were purposefully excluded from groups in which political misinformation and hate speech were freely disseminated.
It was stated by Madung that encryption is a red herring that is used to prevent responsibility on the site. Within the context of elections, the issues are not necessarily solely related to the content of the message. The point is that a relatively small number of individuals can easily wind up exerting a significant amount of influence over larger groups of individuals. The friction that hindered the flow of information across society has been eliminated thanks to these applications.