{"id":218,"date":"2019-11-07T07:11:35","date_gmt":"2019-11-07T07:11:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/populareducation.in\/loksamvad\/?post_type=article&p=218"},"modified":"2019-11-07T07:11:35","modified_gmt":"2019-11-07T07:11:35","slug":"india-the-whatsapp-election","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"http:\/\/populareducation.in\/loksamvad\/article\/india-the-whatsapp-election\/","title":{"rendered":"India: the WhatsApp election"},"content":{"rendered":"FT.com<\/strong>\r\n\r\nSanjukta Pandey quit her job as a hair and make-up stylist in March to devote herself to Indian prime minister Narendra Modi\u2019s re-election campaign on social media.\r\n\r\nMs Pandey, a feisty 32-year-old wearing huge hoop earrings, neon pink lipstick and a tattoo of Mr Modi\u2019s name on her left forearm, now spends her waking hours spreading his election message on WhatsApp and other social media apps. \u201cI\u2019m online almost 24\/7. I don\u2019t go to sleep; we want Mr Modi to come back,\u201d she says. \u201cYou won\u2019t see anyone getting inked with Rahul Gandhi\u2019s name.\u201d\r\n\r\nIndia\u2019s ruling Bharatiya Janata party is using WhatsApp to wage one of the world\u2019s most sophisticated digital political campaigns, carried out by a vast army of volunteers like Ms Pandey, who are devoted to Mr Modi\u2019s brand of Hindu nationalism.\r\n\r\nAs internet access surges in India with the proliferation of smartphones and cheap data, more than 300m Indians are now on WhatsApp, making the country by far its biggest market.\r\n\r\nFacebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says putting resources into building new privacy tools will mean it will take \u2018longer to ship new products\u2019 \u00a9 AFP\r\n\r\nWhile campaigns used to be conducted on TV and at large rallies, WhatsApp has become the central battleground of India\u2019s election, which began on April 11 and will conclude on May 19.\r\n\r\nThe Indian contest follows a divisive election in Brazil, where far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro swept into power in October \u2014 helped in part by a wave of toxic rumours and misinformation, much of it spread over WhatsApp.\r\n\r\nNow India is becoming the latest test case of the capacity of the messaging app, whose millions of small groups of encrypted users are often beyond the purview of electoral authorities or independent fact-checkers, to potentially shape the election in the world\u2019s largest democracy.\r\n\r\nFor every supporter who says the app has helped bring together families and friends with a cheap communication tool, there are as many critics who fear it has become an impossible to monitor conduit for fake news.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhatsApp is the echo chamber of all unmitigated lies, fakes and crap in India, it\u2019s a toxic cesspool,\u201d says Palanivel Thiagarajan, an elected official and head of the IT department of DMK, a regional party in the state of Tamil Nadu who is running against the BJP. \u201cIf it were up to me I would say just cut it, there are hundreds of substitutes.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe messaging app, which has 1.5bn users globally, has risen to popularity particularly outside the US in countries where its parent company Facebook is hoping to grow new revenue streams.\r\n\r\nIndia\u2019s ruling Bharatiya Janata party is using WhatsApp to wage one of the world\u2019s most sophisticated digital political campaigns on behalf of Narendra Modi \u00a9 AFP\r\n\r\nClaire Wardle, a research fellow at Harvard University and co-founder of First Draft, a non-profit group addressing misinformation on social media, says WhatsApp took off with the explosion of smartphone users in countries such as Brazil, Nigeria and India, where it has become \u201ca primary source of information\u201d.\r\n\r\n\u201cThese questions about its role in the spread of misinformation are not just to do with elections,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s about WhatsApp\u2019s role in societies, full stop.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn recent years, it has been Facebook itself which has attracted most of the criticism around the spread of false news and electoral manipulation. The report by special counsel Robert Mueller outlined the extensive efforts by Russian actors to manipulate the 2016 US presidential election using Facebook. It also came under fire when it emerged Myanmar\u2019s military was using the social network to incite violence against the Muslim Rohingya minority in the country.\r\n\r\nBut it is WhatsApp, which Facebook bought for $22bn in 2014, which has become the communications platform of choice not just in India and Brazil, but also across swaths of Europe including Spain and the UK. Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, has said WhatsApp\u2019s intimate form of communication is the future of the Facebook group.\r\n\r\n\u201cIn the last year or so we have seen a move from Facebook news feed to more private channels, including WhatsApp and Messenger, particularly in places like Brazil,\u201d says Ms Wardle.\r\n\r\nIts encryption system means that in contrast with Facebook or Twitter, WhatsApp conversations are impenetrable even to the company itself, say executives. But that has made it more vulnerable to misuse, especially in elections, say critics, who argue it has become a platform for spreading campaign-related misinformation.\r\n\r\nIndia is becoming the latest test case of the capacity of WhatsApp, whose millions of small groups of encrypted users are often beyond the purview of electoral authorities \u00a9 Bloomberg\r\n\r\nThis risk came to a head in Brazil last year, in what became known as the first \u201cWhatsApp election\u201d. With 120m WhatsApp users in a country of over 211m, the platform was flooded ahead of the October vote with false rumours, doctored photographs and audio hoaxes \u2014 much of which helped Mr Bolsonaro. Researchers studying 100,000 images circulating in 347 groups found that only 8 per cent were \u201cfully truthful\u201d.\r\n\r\n\u201cMisinformation was huge in Brazil. It was an election plagued with fake news that left behind a country split in half by hatred,\u201d says Fabr\u00edcio Benevenuto at the Federal University of Minas Gerais and a researcher on the impact of the social media network. \u201cThe political discussion ended up being reduced to a meme.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn India, the BJP has been the most active of the main parties in trying to use WhatsApp to win votes. \u201cI\u2019ve been trying to reach every household via at least WhatsApp,\u201d says Punit Agarwal, the BJP\u2019s social media co-ordinator for the Delhi area.\r\n\r\nMr Agarwal says the party has 74,000 volunteers tasked with spreading its message over WhatsApp. \u201cThere was a limited audience last time,\u201d he says. \u201cThis time we have a vast audience.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhatsApp has become the platform of choice for politicians because of its massive reach that goes beyond a party\u2019s loyal voter base, but also because of the lack of gatekeepers. Messages forwarded through the system have no context about where they originate, but benefit from the trust of coming from a contact.\r\n\r\nMr Agarwal denies that the BJP is spreading polarising content, but public WhatsApp data collected by analysts and anecdotal evidence show that Indians are being flooded with propaganda memes, much of it anti-Muslim and critical of the opposition Congress party. \u201cWhatsApp groups are considered the most dangerous,\u201d says SY Quraishi, India\u2019s former election commissioner. \u201cThe disastrous potential of this media is very strong; you\u2019ve seen how rumours floating [around] can cause havoc.\u201d\r\n\r\nBecause of the extensive political participation on WhatsApp in India, the company said it began to plan its election strategy early. \u201cWe know political parties are using WhatsApp to organise, and we decided to do a test run [to monitor it] during the Karnataka election,\u201d says Carl Woog, WhatsApp\u2019s head of communications, referring to regional elections last May.\r\n\r\nAt the time, WhatsApp discovered that one of the political parties, which it declines to name, had created a large number of groups using the party\u2019s name all at the same time, and was adding several people to them in an obvious effort to spread propaganda in contravention of WhatsApp rules. \u201cWe had a pretty good sense of what was going on and we banned those groups,\u201d he says, adding that this was the first time the company had observed this viral group behaviour.\r\n\r\nKiran Garimella, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is studying misinformation in India, analysed more than 5m WhatsApp messages posted in 5,000 public groups over the past five months, covering roughly 1m people.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe have observed that it is specifically focused on image-based, subtle misinformation,\u201d says Mr Garimella, giving an example of doctored screenshots from a reputable news channel.\r\n\r\nThe top shared images accused Congress leader Rahul Gandhi of being a \u201cfake Hindu\u201d and invented a link to Vijay Mallya, India\u2019s fugitive billionaire businessman. A recurring favourite message shows Mr Gandhi praying at a mosque, insinuating that he is a Muslim to deter Hindu voters.\r\n\r\nBrazilian president Jair Bolsonaro swept into power in October \u2014 helped in part by a wave of toxic rumours and misinformation, much of it spread over WhatsApp \u00a9 Reuters\r\n\r\nSimilar to the Brazilian campaign, academics say WhatsApp is being used by parties to polarise citizens by playing on communal tensions.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m a member of over 100 WhatsApp groups run formally or informally by BJP supporters,\u201d says Soma Basu, a fellow at the Reuters Institute of Journalism and an Indian journalist. \u201cI\u2019m analysing 75,000 messages I\u2019ve received in this time, many of which are very disturbing and violent, such as a video of a youth being beheaded in the name of religion.\u201d\r\n\r\nReligious propaganda is not just a WhatsApp problem and is spreading through Facebook, Twitter, Indian social media app ShareChat and other platforms but, \u201cWhatsApp carries the credibility of the sender, it\u2019s more private and personal, so a lot of things that can\u2019t be said on Twitter or Facebook can easily be said on WhatsApp\u201d, she says.\r\n\r\nThe study of WhatsApp political groups in Brazil revealed an elaborate \u201cpyramid\u201d structure of how misinformation spreads on the platform, cascading from regional and local activists to individual citizens and their friends. In India, the structure of WhatsApp political groups is also layered and complex.\r\n\r\nThe BJP\u2019s social media department targets undecided voters with tailored messages, customised according to voting history, class and caste, says a former data analyst for the party, Shivam Shankar Singh. The messages almost never came from official BJP channels, but WhatsApp groups organise outside the party.\r\n\r\nBoth main parties spread fake news but the \u201cBJP sends messages with communal and religious fundamentalist messages which Congress doesn\u2019t. [Congress] share a lot of fake statistics, but they clearly don\u2019t have a sound strategy,\u201d Ms Basu adds.\r\n\r\nDespite its huge presence in India, WhatsApp only hired its first employee in the country last year. But since then, the app has struggled to contain a torrent of false news in India \u2014 from rumours about child kidnappings to fake footage of terrorist attacks and dead bodies \u2014 that has contributed to bouts of mob violence and unrest. WhatsApp says it bans roughly 400,000 accounts in India every month.\r\n\r\nIn response to legal threats from the Indian government starting last July, which demanded that it make changes to how it operates in order to improve accountability, WhatsApp appointed a grievance officer to deal with complaints from users and hired its first-ever India head, Abhijit Bose, in March.\r\n\r\nThe biggest challenge is that, unlike Facebook, WhatsApp cannot identify the source of a message without breaking its encryption system. Instead, it has worked to make sharing more difficult, including limiting the number of recipients of a forwarded message, reducing group sizes and allowing users to decline group invitations. Other product changes being tested include a fact-checking service for images received through the app, although it would not be rolled out in time for the election, Mr Woog says.\r\n\r\nThese measures to limit virality have had limited impact, according to independent academics. \u201cWe see many instances where the same message was sent on multiple groups, over 20 groups within a 10-second window, that means there is a person or software sending the messages,\u201d says Mr Garimella.\r\n\r\nPre-election propaganda claimed Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was a ‘fake Hindu’ \u00a9 Reuters\r\n\r\nWhatsApp says it has also spent about $10m in India to run a public education campaign around the dangers of misinformation on traditional media such as television, radio and newspapers. \u201cI think I would say without hyperbole it\u2019s probably the largest public education campaign about misinformation ever undertaken,\u201d says Mr Woog.\r\n\r\nThe company is working with third-party organisations such as Boom Live, one of India\u2019s independent WhatsApp fact-checkers, and AltNews, as well as the non-profit group Proto, on official fact-checking services for the duration of the election.\r\n\r\nThe efforts mirror those by non-profit First Draft during the Brazilian election, where a consortium of journalists fact-checked more than 65,000 tips and messages received from users via a dedicated WhatsApp number.\r\n\r\n\u201cMost of the stuff we are busting or verifying owes its origin to WhatsApp. There is fake news on Facebook too, but the numbers are small compared with WhatsApp. We get hundreds of reports each day,\u201d says Govindraj Ethiraj, founder of BoomLive. Facebook has recently removed hundreds of \u201cinauthentic\u201d pages.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FT.com Sanjukta Pandey quit her job as a hair and make-up stylist in March to devote herself to Indian prime minister Narendra Modi\u2019s re-election campaign on social media. Ms Pandey, a feisty 32-year-old wearing huge hoop earrings, neon pink lipstick…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"issuem_issue":[8],"class_list":["post-218","article","type-article","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","issuem_issue-june-2019","entry","no-media"],"yoast_head":"\nIndia: the WhatsApp election - Lok Samvad<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/populareducation.in\/loksamvad\/article\/india-the-whatsapp-election\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"India: the WhatsApp election - Lok Samvad\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"FT.com Sanjukta Pandey quit her job as a hair and make-up stylist in March to devote herself to Indian prime minister Narendra Modi\u2019s re-election campaign on social media. 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