Fixing fake news not by technology alone

Fixing fake news not by technology alone

For WhatsApp, India is a big market, with more than 22 crore users, who spent 85 billion hours using the app over the last three months. WhatsApp is preparing to monetise this huge user base through a payments app and through message delivery for businesses. It has a core interest in complying with the government’s instruction to create a local office, appoint a grievance officer, store data locally for payments and check fake news, including by tracing fake news back to the originator. But that does not mean that the government should pass the fake news buck to the platform on which it appears.

Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, is under pressure across the world to stop its platform being used to spread fake news and peddle influence that is deemed illegal in certain contexts such as elections. The claim that tracing a message back to its originator would violate privacy principles is not valid. Privacy concerns do not prevent law enforcement authorities from carrying out searches of private premises, when these are required, and legal warrants empower them to carry out such actions. Similar principles and standards of privacy should apply to the online world as well. Administrators of fake-news-spreading Whats-App groups should be to held to account, at least to the extent of identifying the source, for messages that appear on their group. WhatsApp should be able to pinpoint the administrator of a group at any point of time.

That said, fixing fake news is not primarily a technological challenge. Fake news that incite violence should be treated as abetment of or conspiracy to commit that crime and its originators, criminals. In the run-up to crucial elections, social media platforms must also declare the identity of those paying for the ads they carry.