App launches paper on ‘stopping abuse’ in India, home to more than 200m of its users

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

WhatsApp says it is deleting 2m accounts per month as part of an effort to blunt the use of the world’s most popular messaging app to spread fake news and misinformation.

The Facebook-owned service published the data as part of a white paper on “stopping abuse” that was launched on Wednesday in India, the biggest market for the company with more than 200m users.

It has also been the most challenging market for the technology giant, which has been criticised by the Indian government for its role in up to 30 mob lynchings that were said to have been triggered by incendiary rumours spread using the app.

In response to the violence, as well as the increased scrutiny of broadcast-oriented social media services such as Facebook and Twitter, WhatsApp has sought to present itself as a private messaging app designed for communication between individuals or small groups.

The company has limited the number of people to whom a message could be forwarded in India to five, a restriction that was extended to the rest of the world in January.

On Wednesday, the company said it was encouraging users to report and employing machine learning to weed out accounts that appeared to be trying to send messages in bulk.

“We’re not here to give people a megaphone, we’re here for private messaging,” said Matt Jones, who leads the anti-spam engineering team at the company.

He said the company had discovered examples of “attackers” rigging hardware to be able to control several accounts simultaneously. Others used emulators to run multiple accounts on the same computer.

Around 95% of the 2m accounts banned each month were as a result of “abnormal WhatsApp behaviour” detected by the company, rather than from user reports, Jones said.

One giveaway was that messages sent by automated accounts rarely displayed a “typing” status. Suspicious accounts also tended to send high volumes of messages soon after registering.

India will hold the largest elections in history starting in April, providing an unprecedented test of WhatsApp’s defence against bulk messaging, which the company blames for the majority of problematic content.

Jones said WhatsApp had seen evidence in earlier Indian state elections of a major party appearing to create multiple groups of voters based on demographic data.

“We engaged with political parties to send our firm view that WhatsApp is not a broadcast service and not a place to send messages at scale and to explain to them that we will be banning accounts that engage in automated or bulk behaviour,” said Carl Woog, the company’s head of communications.

Indian parties and their supporters have tried to get around the forwarding limit by creating as many groups as possible – the maximum group size is 256 users.

Facebook said last year it had removed 1.5bn accounts in the six months to November as part of its own crackdown on misinformation and spam. Twitter also culled what it said were millions of “problematic” accounts last July.

Alongside the technological fixes, WhatsApp has also invested in advertisement campaigns asking users to “spread joy, not rumours” and street theatre warning people about uncritically believing messages received on the app.