Opinion | Weaponisation of WhatsApp in Brazilian election has lessons for India

Representative Image

Bala Murali Krishna

On October 28, Jair Bolsonaro, a far Right candidate, won Brazil’s presidential race. While that is seen as significant to the world for climate change, Amazon rainforests and women’s rights, among others, its significance to India is different and direct — the potential weaponisation of WhatsApp, as five states go to polls starting next month, and perhaps in the Lok Sabha election next year.

By all accounts Bolsonaro’s campaign manipulated the encrypted messaging app, probably enough to distort the race. He used the platform to spread the rumour that his rival, Workers’ Party candidate Fernando Haddad, distributed baby bottles with a penis-shaped teat purportedly to fight homophobia.

Facebook-owned WhatsApp did precious little to fight ‘fake news’ on its platform. It didn’t send an executive to a key meeting of the Superior Electoral Court — the equivalent of India’s election commission — in which executives from Google, Twitter and Facebook participated. Instead, it assigned a manager to join the meeting via video conference Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana, Chhattisgarh and Mizoram. The manager failed to answer many questions and provided a wrong answer to one.

WhatsApp was not exactly pro-active otherwise too. It acted only after the Folha daily had published an exposé detailing a Cambridge Analytica-style operation of harvesting user data to then target them. WhatsApp later claimed removing “hundreds of thousands” of accounts on suspicions they were bots.

All in all, WhatsApp’s conduct was far from exemplary for a leading global messaging platform addressing the latest scourge in a democracy: fake news. It was particularly regrettable because Brazil forms its second-largest market. Yet, as Christina Tardáguila, director of the Brazilian fact-checking group Agência Lupa, said, “It gives us a sense of how important we are.”

Starting next month, India goes to polls in five states — Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana, Chhattisgarh and Mizoram. These races are much smaller, involving a few lakh voters each, compared to over 100 million in Brazil’s presidential run-off. But their smaller size makes it easier to distribute ‘fake news’ or manipulate by other means, probably right until the moment a voter enters the voting booth.

India’s troubles with WhatsApp, and fake news, began earlier this year. False rumours, spread rapidly on WhatsApp, were linked with at least two dozen lynching deaths — including one of a Google engineer in Karnataka’s Bidar district.

These deaths prompted India to first seriously engage with WhatsApp, even though the app had by then become near ubiquitous on smartphones in the country. This led WhatsApp to take some remedial measures without impinging on privacy or compromising its end-to-end encryption. Among other things, WhatsApp cut to five the number of ‘forwards’ — an especially mindless way for a user to send a message to others regardless of its authenticity or its origins — compared to 20 in Brazil. This, in theory, slows down the spread of rumours, and perhaps softens their impact, too.

WhatsApp has run educational campaigns to raise awareness about ‘fake news’. But, their impact is, at best, unknown.

Partially heeding a direct demand from India, WhatsApp also named a chief grievance officer. But that person, Komal Lahiri, is to be based in the United States. A full-fledged team operating in India will take much longer, and won’t be in place when the assembly elections are held. WhatsApp chief executive Chris Daniels, who is currently on a visit to India, says the company will name an India head by the year’s end.

While these are positive steps, India would do well to expect more from the American company. For at least two reasons, it enjoys more leverage over WhatsApp than Brazil, or most other countries.

One stems from size. With 200 million users, India is by far the biggest market for WhatsApp. Brazil, its second largest, has 138 million. Besides, Indians’ addiction to the platform is astonishing. People literally wake up to ‘Good Morning’ greetings and say ‘Good Night’, a practice Google discovered was the reason many of its global servers were running out of space. WhatsApp is on the cusp of monetising such traffic in innovative ways.

The second factor that has given India leverage is from the US company’s desire to operate in the country a payments platform to rival those from Google, Paypal and Paytm. India has kept the nascent company waiting for more reasons than one. It has used this to force WhatsApp to, for example, seriously address rumours on the platform, besides becoming an early adopter of local data storage of payments transactions, ordered by the Reserve Bank of India.

With the benefit of lessons learnt by Brazil, India should push WhatsApp to do more, perhaps far more. It could insist on targeted educational campaigns alongside campaigning in the elections due in five states. Or explore ways to identify and block marketing firms that meddle with the political process, or block fake accounts and bots.

Fake news and rumours, probably, pose the biggest challenge because WhatsApp is fully encrypted, meaning nobody but the sender and recipient can read the contents of any message. However, who is to say technology cannot yield other creative ways.

(Bala Murali Krishna works for a New York-based startup. Views are personal)

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