The messaging app, with close to 200 million users in the country, has supposedly become an instrument to spread not just fake news, but also rumours leading to violence.

The incidents of violence, abetted by WhatsApp forwards, have emerged from the states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and most recently from Maharashtra, where five people were lynched by a mob which suspected that they were part of a gang of child-lifters.

Here are some of the recent cases in which people were killed and WhatsApp rumours purportedly had a role to play: