Archives: News

The favourite Facebook-owned platform is being used to market propaganda and sway the voter's favour, according to a new report. Over 87,000 groups are currently active on the platform with the purpose of spreading fake news. The abundant availability of data implies the worrisome nature of the spread of fake news across the country. Although Whatsapp has launched a series of initiatives to curb the spread of fake news, the onus ultimately will lie at the discretion of the user.

WhatsApp has launched another education campaign– "Share Joy, Not Rumours"–to educate users to not misuse the platform with elections just a few weeks away. While the previous campaigns focused on educating the users through media, TV and radio advertisements, this campaign aims to instruct people on the inbuilt controls that the application provides as an attempt to curb the spread of false information.

Urban Indians are worried about online fake news, but still heavily consume news through WhatsApp and Facebook. According to a study by the Reuters Institute India, instant messaging services are used as source of news far more in India than any other country. The level of engagement with news on social media platforms is high, with headlines and photos being the biggest factors on whether or not Indians click on a report on social platforms.

Indian politicians and political parties are not buying ads on Twitter yet, while money is being pumped on a large scale into Facebook advertising. It is partly because Twitter is less transparent in showing details about political ads and is less popular than Facebook in India. On March 11, Twitter rolled out its Ad Transparency Centre: an archive that shows the promoted tweets that have been run over the past week. This initiative is an attempt to boost transparency ahead of the Indian elections.

Facebook's sister-app WhatsApp will soon be rolling out two new features for forwarded message which will reveal the count of how frequently that message has been forwarded. The two new features called 'Forwarding Info' and 'Frequently Forwarded' are unavailable at the moment, but will be rolled out soon.

WhatsApp has partnered with the social arm of National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) to deliver digital literacy training. Aiming to curb fake news, propaganda and misinformation menace on its platform, the training will reach 1,00,000 people before the Lok Sabha Elections 2019. The first batch of training is scheduled to start from March 27 in Delhi, followed by workshops for representatives from rural and urban locations, and roadshows and interactions in various colleges. NASSCOM Foundation will provide volunteers to be trained, who would later share their learning with at least three more people, fulfilling the NASSCOM Foundation mandate of ‘Each One Teach Three’ campaign.

WhatsApp 's newly appointed Head of India believes that although quite a number of steps have been taken to ensure user security on WhatsApp, the company has been taking additional steps to curb the spread of misinformation. In his first statement after taking over as country head in November 2018, Bose said WhatsApp is committed to keeping its users safe. This came in the backdrop of the Indian government asking all the social media platforms to take responsibility for their misuse. Bose also indicated future plans of the company in India, which included growing of small businesses which would help entrepreneurs use the platform to answer questions, send information and sell products, launching its payment service and build partnerships across the country to develop growing startup-ecosystem.

The Parliamentary Committee on Information Technology has asked Facebook to do more to tackle the fake news on its platforms. Facebook executives, including global policy chief Joel Kaplan and India head Ajit Mohan, recently met with the panel, according to a Reuters report. The company was told it was not doing enough to curb misinformation on its platform. The company declined to comment on the hearings of the committee.

WhatsApp has banned over 6 million accounts in three months in its efforts against fighting fake news and platform abuse. The company has 1.5 billion monthly active users and has banned 2 million accounts a month over the last three months. WhatsApp has built sophisticated machine learning systems to detect abusive behaviour and ban suspicious accounts at registration, during messaging, and in response to user reports.