Michael Reynolds / Getty Images
Hours after WhatsApp announced a new privacy policy to the nearly 2 billion people around the world who use it, rumors flew fast and thick.
“Do not accept WhatsApp’s new policy,” said one of the messages on the platform. “Once you do that, your WhatsApp account will be linked to your Facebook account and Zuckerberg can see all your chats.”
“In a few months, WhatsApp will launch a new version that will show you based on your chats,” said another. “Do not accept the new policy!”
Thousands of similar messages hit WhatsApp, Facebook’s instant messaging app, in the days that followed. Millions of people rushed to download WhatsApp alternatives like Signal and Telegram, by celebrities like Tesla CEO Elon Musk and whistleblower Edward Snowden.
There was only one problem: from the 4,000 word policy, it was clear that the new changes would only apply if people used WhatsApp to chat with businesses, not private conversations with friends and family.
No, the new terms do not allow Facebook to read your WhatsApp chats, the company explained to anyone who asked for it. Top executives posted long wires given to Twitter and interviewed major publications in India, the company’s largest market. WhatsApp has spent millions to buy front page ads in major newspapers and released graphs of the rumors on its website with a large “Share to WhatsApp” button, hoping to get some truth in the flow of misinformation through its platform to spray. The company also encouraged Facebook employees to share these infographics, according to reports on its internal message board Workplace.
“There was a lot of misinformation and confusion, so we’re working to provide accurate information on how WhatsApp protects people’s personal conversations,” a WhatsApp spokesman told BuzzFeed News. “We use our status feature to communicate directly with people in WhatsApp, as well as to post accurate information on social media and our website in dozens of languages. Of course, we have also made these resources available to people who work at our company. can answer questions directly to friends and family if they wish. ‘
None of that worked.
“There has been a lot of misinformation causing concern and we want to help everyone understand our principles and facts,” WhatsApp wrote in a blog post last week, announcing that the company will delay the new privacy policy by three months. “We are also going to do a lot more to clear up the wrong information about how privacy and security work on WhatsApp,” he wrote.
Many thanks to everyone who issued. We are still working to counter confusion by communicating directly with @ WhatsApp users. No one will suspend or delete their account on February 8 and we will move our business plans until after May – https://t.co/H3DeSS0QfO
Twitter
Rumors and fake news spreading via WhatsApp have for years fueled a misinformation crisis in some of the world’s most populous countries such as Brazil and India, where the app is the main way most people talk to each other. The crisis has now reached the company itself.
‘Trust in platforms is [at a] at the bottom, ”Claire Wardle, co-founder and CEO of First Draft, a non-profit organization that investigates misinformation, told BuzzFeed News. ‘Years ago we became increasingly concerned about the power of technology companies, especially the awareness of how much data they collect about us. So if privacy policy is changed, people are rightly concerned about what it means. ”
Wardle said people are worried that WhatsApp will link their behavior on the app to the data from their Facebook accounts.
“Facebook and WhatsApp have a huge trust deficit,” said Pratik Sinha, founder of Alt News, a fact-checking platform in India. “Once you have it, any wrong information can be easily applied.”
What does not help, Sinha and Wardle also said, is the lack of understanding among ordinary people of how technology and privacy work. “Confusion is where misinformation thrives,” Wardle said, “so people saw the policy changes, jumped to conclusions and many people did not believe the rumor.”
These patterns of misinformation that have thrived on WhatsApp for years have often led to damage. In 2013, a video went viral in Muzaffarnagar, a city in northern India, that allegedly showed two young men being lynched, inciting riots between the Hindu and Muslim communities in which dozens of people died. A police investigation found that the video was more than two years old and had not even been shot in India. In Brazil, fake news flooded the platform and was used to favor far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro, who won the country’s 2018 presidential election.
The company only seriously addressed its problem with misinformation until 2018, when rumors of child abductors sweeping through the platform led to a series of violent lynchings across India. In a statement released at the time, the Indian IT ministry warned WhatsApp about legal action, saying the company would be treated ‘as abetors’ if it did not resolve the issue, sending WhatsApp into a crisis mode. It flew top executives from Menlo Park, California, headquarters to New Delhi to meet with government officials and journalists, and brought up awareness campaigns around misinformation.
Sam Panthaky / Getty Images
A protest in July 2018 against mob lynchings in India. Dozens of people were lynched across the country that year thanks to WhatsApp rumors, which caused the Indian authorities and WhatsApp to scramble to find a solution.
It also has new features built into the app to directly counteract incorrect information for the first time, such as labeling forwarded messages and limiting the number of people or groups. A piece of content can be redirected to slow down viral content. In August last year, it also started having people in a handful of countries upload the text of a message to Google to verify that a forwarding was false. The feature is not yet available for WhatsApp users in India.
Since then, the company has been working on a tool that allows users to search in 2019 with a single tap of images they received in the app, a step that can help people more easily verify facts. But almost two years later, there is no sign of the feature, although a text version is available in more than a dozen countries that India so far does not include.
“We are still working on the search feature,” a WhatsApp spokesman told BuzzFeed News.
WhatsApp said the company wants to provide more clarity on its new privacy policy. ‘We want to emphasize that this update does not extend our ability to share data with Facebook. “Our goal is to provide transparency and new options for liaising with businesses so that they can serve and grow their customers,” the spokesman said. WhatsApp will always protect personal messages with end-to-end encryption so that WhatsApp and Facebook cannot see them. We work to address incorrect information and remain available to answer questions. ”
This week, the company placed a status message, WhatsApp’s equivalent of a Facebook story, at the top of the section for people’s status. By tapping on the status, a series of messages from the company are revealed that expose the rumors.
BuzzFeed News- Screenshots
“WhatsApp does not share your contacts with Facebook,” said the first one. Two more status updates have made it clear that WhatsApp cannot see people’s location and cannot read or listen to encrypted personal conversations. “We are committed to your privacy,” the latest post said.
On Thursday, employees had several questions to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ahead of a weekly V&A, according to internal communications seen by BuzzFeed News. Some wanted to know if the growing move to Signal and Telegram is affecting the usage and growth statistics of WhatsApp. Others wanted the CEO to speak out about whether Facebook used WhatsApp metadata to deliver ads.
‘Do you think we could have done a better job of explaining clearly? [the new privacy policy] to users? Asked someone.
“Public has been furiously changed @ WhatsApp PrivPolicy,” another person said. “Distrust in FB is so high that we need to be more careful about it.”
Ryan Mac reported.