In 2024, Populations in 64 countries, including large democracies such as the United States and India, or about half of the world's population, will head to the polls.Like social media companies , and , committed to protecting the integrity of these elections, at least as far as the rhetoric and de facto claims made in their platform are concerned. However, the closed messaging app WhatsApp is missing from this conversation. WhatsApp now rivals public social media platforms in both scope and reach. This absence is worrying researchers at the nonprofit organization Mozilla.
“Nearly 90% of the security measures promised by Meta ahead of this election are focused on Facebook and Instagram,” said Odanga Madun, a senior researcher at Mozilla who specializes in elections and platform integrity. he told Engadget. “Why hasn’t Meta publicly committed to a public roadmap showing exactly how it will protect elections within (WhatsApp)?”
Over the past decade, WhatsApp, which was acquired by Meta (then Facebook) in 2014 for $19 billion; You will be able to communicate with most parts of the world outside of the United States. In 2020, WhatsApp announced that it has more than 2 billion users worldwide. This dwarfs all other social and messaging apps except for Facebook itself.
Despite its size, Meta is primarily focused on Facebook when it comes to election-related security measures.Mozilla's It turns out that Facebook has made 95 election-related policy announcements since 2016, the year the social network came under scrutiny for its support. and promotes extreme political sentiment. Whatsapp he did only 14 times. By comparison, Google and YouTube made 35 and 27 announcements, respectively, while X and TikTok made 34 and 21 announcements, respectively. „Based on public disclosures, Meta's campaign appears to be overwhelmingly focused on Facebook,“ Madun wrote in the report.
Mozilla is Meta brings major changes to how WhatsApp works during voting day and in the months before and after national elections. These include adding disinformation labels to viral content (“Forwarded often: Please review” instead of the current “Forwarded many times: Please review”), broadcasting and limiting community features, including allowing you to message hundreds of people at the same time and asking people to „pause.“ „Please reflect before forwarding anything,“ a company spokesperson told Engadget. More than 16,000 people signed Mozilla's pledge to ask WhatsApp to slow the spread of political misinformation. He said he signed the document.
First of all, WhatsApp Service frictions arose after an incident that killed dozens of people in India, the company's biggest market. It was caused by misinformation spread on the platform. This includes limiting the number of people or groups a user can forward content to, and distinguishing forwarded messages with a „forwarded“ label. Adding the „forwarded“ label was a measure to suppress misinformation. The idea was that people might treat forwarded content more skeptically.
„People using WhatsApp for the first time in Kenya, Nigeria or India may not think about what the 'forwarding' label means in the context of misinformation,“ Madun said. „In fact, it can have the opposite effect: that because something is highly transferable, it must be trustworthy. For many communities, social proof is about trust in something. It is an important element for establishing gender.
The idea to make people stop and think came from a feature on Twitter. The app encouraged people to actually read the article before retweeting it if they didn't have it open.twitter This prompt led to 40% more people opening the article before retweeting it.
We also asked WhatsApp to temporarily disable its broadcast and community features due to concerns about the possibility of forwarding or otherwise sending messages to thousands of people at once. „They're trying to turn this into the next big social media platform,“ Madun said. “However, the introduction of safety features is not taken into account.”
„WhatsApp is one of the only technology companies to intentionally limit sharing by introducing forwarding limits and labeling messages that have been forwarded multiple times,“ a WhatsApp spokesperson told Engadget. Told. „We've built new tools to help users find accurate information while protecting them from unwanted contact. Read more about this. ”
Mozilla's request came about because About the company's platform and elections in Brazil, India, and Liberia. The former are two of WhatsApp's biggest markets, but most of Liberia's population lives in rural areas with low internet penetration, making traditional online fact-checking nearly impossible. Mozilla found that in all three countries, political parties make heavy use of WhatsApp's broadcast feature to „micro-target“ voters with propaganda and, in some cases, hate speech.
The encrypted nature of WhatsApp also makes it impossible for researchers to monitor what is circulating within the platform's ecosystem. This limitation has not stopped some researchers from trying. In 2022, Rutgers University professors Kiran Garimella and Simon Chandrachud visited political party offices in India and succeeded in persuading officials to add their party to the 500 WhatsApp groups they run. did. The data they collected was They wrote, „What is circulating on India's Partisan WhatsApp?“ Although the findings were surprising, Garimella and Chandrachud found that it was not actually misinformation or hate speech that made up the bulk of these groups' content. Stated. The authors revealed that their sample size was small and that they may have been intentionally excluded from the group. A group where hate speech and political misinformation flows freely.
“Encryption is a dangerous tool that prevents accountability on platforms,” Madun said. “In the context of elections, the issue is not necessarily purely about the content. It is about the fact that a small number of people can easily have a large influence on a group of people. We have removed the friction of information transmission.”
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