WhatsApp / WIRED

WhatsApp is the world's biggest messaging app, with more than 1.5 billion monthly users, and it has been abused. Misinformation and fake news on the service has been linked to violence, murders and internet shutdowns around the world.

Now the Facebook-owned app has a plan to deal with its problems. How will it do this? With academics and a measly $1 million. (During the last three months its parent company had revenues of $13.7bn).


WhatsApp has announced it is giving 20 different research groups $50,000 to help it understand the ways that rumours and fake news spread on its platform. The groups are based around the world and will be responsible for producing reports on how the messaging app has impacted certain regions.

The range of areas that are being studied highlight the scale of misinformation that WhatsApp faces. One set of researchers from the UK and US are set to see how misinformation can lead to disease outbreaks in elderly people, one will look at how information was shared on WhatsApp in the 2018 Brazilian elections and another is examining how posts can go viral on the messaging service.

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The biggest area WhatsApp is attempting to understand is the behaviour of people. As the messaging service is end-to-end encrypted it isn't possible for it to see the content of messages being sent over its platform (including their text, images and videos and links). Without removing the encryption protocols it introduced in 2016 the company can't easily change its service.

"There is a clear link between the (mis)information that people receive from trusted sources in their WhatsApp groups and their inclination to act on that information," says Sander van der Linden, from the University of Cambridge. The assistant professor of social psychology will be using WhatsApp's money to develop a WhatsApp game for understanding fake news.


Cambridge's Linden has already gamified fake news in the game Bad News. Players are rewarded with badges for completing certain tasks and identifying misinformation techniques.

"We are now looking to adapt and design an entirely novel version of the game that is based on the WhatsApp interface and user experience and uniquely tailored to how misinformation spreads on WhatsApp," he says.

Over the last 12 months the potential damage that WhatsApp can cause to countries and democracies has been shown. In India more than 30 deaths have been linked to rumours spreading on the app and local authorities have started turning the internet off when social media has caused mobs to gather.

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During Brazil's October election political campaigners scraped Facebook to gather mobile phone numbers being used on WhatsApp and automatically sent them messages. In some instances BBC News reported 300,000 messages were sent at once.

Narisong Huhe from the University of Strathclyde's public policy unit says he will attempt to model how information is passed around on WhatsApp by studying small communities of people. "With such data, we then can tell how people’s attitudes and behaviors change in accordance with their social networks," he says.

"I will also incorporate experiments of misinformation to explore who are more susceptible and infectious," Huhe adds. "Results from these could help me to build up models to simulate misinformation diffusion."

In response to problems around the world, WhatsApp has limited forwarding of messages to five people at once in India. It has also taken out radio and newspaper adverts in countries where its platform has been abused. WhatsApp's lead researcher Mrinalini Rao says the company thinks misinformation is a "long term challenge" and that it needs to work with other people to solve its problems.

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"These studies will help us build upon recent changes we have made within WhatsApp and support broad education campaigns to help keep people safe," Rao said in a statement.

It is not guaranteed that any of the techniques that WhatsApp has commissioned research into will ever be developed into products or changes to the messaging app. It is likely that many of them will stay as academic projects.

But the company has a lot to learn. Relatively little is known about how people use WhatsApp, how they behave on the service or how messages quickly spread among communities. The misinformation problems WhatsApp has faced have often centred on different cultural use cases for its app. For instance in India the service is widely used for news.

Shakuntala Banaji an associate professor in media, communication and development at the London School of Economics and Political Science says WhatsApp needs to understand how its technology is being used. "We want to question the idea that it is either merely the lack of education of most Indian users or the innate capacity of WhatsApp to spread mischief that accounts for the multiple incidents of hate speech and lynching in India," she says.

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