1 research outputs found
Can WhatsApp Benefit from Debunked Fact-Checked Stories to Reduce Misinformation?
WhatsApp was alleged to be widely used to spread misinformation and
propaganda during elections in Brazil and India. Due to the private encrypted
nature of the messages on WhatsApp, it is hard to track the dissemination of
misinformation at scale. In this work, using public WhatsApp data, we observe
that misinformation has been largely shared on WhatsApp public groups even
after they were already fact-checked by popular fact-checking agencies. This
represents a significant portion of misinformation spread in both Brazil and
India in the groups analyzed. We posit that such misinformation content could
be prevented if WhatsApp had a means to flag already fact-checked content. To
this end, we propose an architecture that could be implemented by WhatsApp to
counter such misinformation. Our proposal respects the current end-to-end
encryption architecture on WhatsApp, thus protecting users' privacy while
providing an approach to detect the misinformation that benefits from
fact-checking efforts.Comment: This is a preprint version of an accepted manuscript on The Harvard
Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review. Please, consider to cite it
instead of this on