Private Messaging Apps Allow Misinformation to Flourish Unchecked, Report Finds

While the report was published in the European context, it highlights some key issues we see in India.

Encryption on private messaging apps benefit users while proving to be a hurdle to keeping misinformation and illegal content in check.

(Photo: The Quint)

A report, titled 'Identifying Solutions to Protect Information Integrity on Private Messaging Platforms', published by the Forum on Information and Democracy (FID), detailed how private messaging apps have evolved into platforms that facilitate both private communication and large-scale disinformation.

Co-chaired by the countries of Luxembourg and Ukraine, the report found that private messaging applications allowed messages to go viral horizontally across networks, often eluding the moderation which is typically seen on public platforms, like social media and public forums.

While it focuses on European and Australian case studies and the measures taken by their governments, it also includes India in its foundational data.

In India, a WhatsApp notification isn’t just a message. People widely consider it as a primary news source, a community hub, and increasingly, a digital battleground. 

While we often think of social media as the front line of mis- and disinformation, this study found that one of the biggest threats were end-to-end-encrypted (E2EE) messaging platforms. These platforms and apps allow misinformation to spread through the encrypted, trusted layers of private messaging. 

India and WhatsApp

Over 52 percent of users in countries like India admitted that content from strangers on these apps has influenced their political views, the report said, citing a 2024 study by the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.

This study, by Rosenblat et al., looked at political propaganda and its impact on voter manipulation across 17 countries, including India, which was primarily dissemination through messaging apps like Telegram, WhatsApp, and Viber.

It identified India as a "key battlefield" for political manipulation through such apps, highlighting specific tactics used by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Congress, and their digital operatives, mainly through WhatsApp.

How Does It Work?

WhatsApp has been a primary electoral weapon in India since 2014. The BJP uses a "massive online communications machine" known as the "BJP Digital Army" to reach voters directly, it said.

• Organisational Structure: Political parties and their subsidiaries use interconnected groups to coordinate messaging through an "inner-party system" that flows from national headquarters down to state, district, and booth levels.

• Use of Volunteers and Third Parties: Their research indicated that the BJP leveraged a vast army of national and regional volunteers to manage groups and disseminate content via third-party accounts. Since these accounts are not "official," they are often given license to spread more inflammatory messages.

• Deceptive Recruitment: Operatives use physical posters and QR codes to recruit voters into WhatsApp groups. Some QR codes are presented deceptively as links for 'voter registration' but actually lead to partisan websites that collect phone numbers for campaign mailing lists, the study found.

What's the Issue?

"These platforms have evolved from simple peer-to-peer tools into hybrid communication ecosystems that blur the line between private and public spaces," the FID's report said, as they offer one-to-one communications through chats while also giving people the option to form channels and broadcast groups.

Such "semi-public" platforms are beneficial to users for private communications when they offer E2EE, a feature which acts a hurdle to monitor disinformation and illegal content when used en masse.

Bad, or in India's case, politically motivated actors have previously adapted to platform regulations.

After WhatsApp ramped up its detection and removal of spam and inorganic behaviour, the political actors "shifted to gradually and methodically adding new phone numbers into existing groups" to circumvent detection, the study found.

In the first half of 2024, operatives reportedly bypassed political restrictions on paid messaging by using a verified business account called "Viksit Bharat Sampark" to broadcast propaganda to non-consenting users.

Indians got WhatsApp messages with a letter from the prime minister from random numbers.

(Source: WhatsApp/Screenshot)

The Way Forward

FID's report makes several recommendations to governments and platforms to help tackle the problem of private platforms which also facilitate mass communication.

For governments, it suggested regulating features instead of apps as a whole. One example of this is WhatsApp's "forwarded many times" tag, which detects when a message has been forwarded around a lot, and prohibits users from forwarding this message further to multiple users.

It brought in this feature to "prevent spamming and misinformation," their website says.

The feature was introduced in 2022.

(Source: WhatsApp/Screenshot)

It also recommended governments to push for media literacy initiatives, offering Ukraine’s “Filter” Project and Ireland’s Media Literacy Ireland Network as examples.

The report recommends platforms to offer "on-device" fact-checking, which may allow devices to flag a known piece of misinformation locally while also ensuring the governments do not see private communication.

It goes on to encourage platforms to offer their messaging, broadcasting, and AI functions on separate apps instead of a singular one. Additionally, it says that apps should work proactively to curb inauthentic coordinated behaviour.

The report also suggests that these platforms collaborate with accredited, independent, and civil society organisations to have dedicated accounts or tiplines, such as the one The Quint's WebQoof runs, where users can submit content for verification.

In this case, platforms must not have access to the content shared or information exchanged.

According to their own research, the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights found that only seven percent of app users surveyed across nine countries had ever used a tipline, but nearly 83 percent of them would "find such an option useful."

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