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Hours after WhatsApp announced a new privacy policy for nearly 2 billion people worldwide who use it, the rumors have flown fast and hard.
“Don’t accept WhatsApp’s new policy,” said one of the posts that went viral on the platform. “Once you’ve done that, your WhatsApp account will be linked to your Facebook account and Zuckerberg will be able to see all of your chats.”
“In a few months, WhatsApp will launch a new version that will show you ads based on your chats,” said another. “Do not accept the new policy!”
Thousands of similar messages went viral on WhatsApp, the instant messaging app owned by Facebook, in the days that followed. Encouraged by celebrities like Tesla CEO Elon Musk and whistleblower Edward Snowden, millions of people precipitate to download WhatsApp alternatives like Signal and Telegram.
There was just one problem: From the 4,000-word policy, it was clear that the new changes only applied if people used WhatsApp to chat with businesses, not private chats with friends and family. .
No, the new terms would not allow Facebook to read your WhatsApp chats, the company explained to anyone who asked. Top published executives long threads to Twitter and gave interviews to major publications in India, the company’s largest market. WhatsApp has spent millions buying front page ads in major newspapers and published graphics debunk the rumors on its website with a big “Share on WhatsApp” button, in the hopes of injecting some truth into the flood of misinformation running through its platform. The company also encouraged Facebook employees to share these infographics, according to posts on its internal Workplace bulletin board.
“There has been a lot of misinformation and confusion so we are working to provide accurate information on how WhatsApp protects people’s personal conversations,” a WhatsApp spokesperson 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’ve made these resources available to people as well. who work in our company. so that they can answer questions directly to their friends and family if they wish. “
None of this worked.
“There has been a lot of worrying misinformation and we want to help everyone understand our principles and the facts,” WhatsApp wrote in a blog post last week, announcing that the company would delay the new privacy policy for three months. “We’re also going to do a lot more to eliminate misinformation about how privacy and security work on WhatsApp,” he wrote.
Thanks to everyone who contacted us. We are always working to address any confusion by communicating directly with @WhatsApp users. No one will see their account suspended or deleted on February 8 and we will be postponing our business plans until after May – https://t.co/H3DeSS0QfO
Twitter
For years, rumors and hoaxes spreading through WhatsApp have fueled a disinformation crisis in some of the most populous countries in the world like Brazil and India, where the app is the primary way most people talk to each other. Now this crisis has hit the company itself.
“Trust in platforms is [at a] deep in the sky, ”Claire Wardle, co-founder and director of First Draft, a nonprofit that researches disinformation, told BuzzFeed News. “For years, people have become increasingly concerned about the power of tech companies, especially the amount of data they collect about us. So when privacy policies are changed, people rightly worry about what that means. “
Wardle said people are concerned that WhatsApp will connect their behavior on the app with 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 that, any kind of misinformation attributed to you is easily consumed.”
What doesn’t help, Sinha and Wardle added, is the lack of understanding among ordinary people of how technology and privacy work. “It is in confusion that disinformation thrives,” Wardle said, “so people saw the policy changes, jumped to conclusions and, unsurprisingly, a lot of people believed the rumor.”
These patterns of disinformation that have thrived on WhatsApp for years have often caused damage. In 2013, a video went viral in Muzaffarnagar, a town in northern India that allegedly showed two young men being lynched, prompting riots between the Hindu and Muslim communities in which dozens of people died. . A police investigation found that the video was over two years old and hadn’t even been shot in India. In Brazil, the fake news flooded the platform and was used to favor far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro, who won the country’s 2018 presidential election.
But the company didn’t seriously address its misinformation issue until 2018, when rumors of child kidnappers sweeping the platform led to a series of violent lynchings across India. In a statement released at the time, the Indian Ministry of Informatics warned WhatsApp filed a lawsuit and said the company would be “treated like an accomplice” if it didn’t fix the issue, sending WhatsApp into crisis mode. He has transported senior executives from the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., To New Delhi to meet with government officials and journalists, and has conducted high-level awareness campaigns around disinformation.
Sam Panthaky / Getty Images
A July 2018 protection against mob lynchings in India. Dozens of people were lynched across the country that year thanks to WhatsApp rumors, leaving Indian authorities and WhatsApp to scramble to find a solution.
It has also integrated new features into the app to directly counter disinformation for the first time, such as labeling of forwarded messages and restrict the number of people or groups that a piece of content could be transferred to slow viral content.
Since then, however, the company has remained silent on the disinformation front. It was would have working on a tool that would allow users to search for images they received in the app with one click in 2019, an initiative that would help people more easily verify the facts. But almost two years later, there is no sign of functionality.
“We’re still working on the functionality of the search tool,” a WhatsApp spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.
WhatsApp said the company wanted to clarify its new privacy policy. “We would like to point out that this update does not extend our ability to share data with Facebook. Our aim is to provide transparency and new options available to engage with businesses so that they can serve their customers and grow, ”the spokesperson said. “WhatsApp will always protect personal messages with end-to-end encryption so that neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can see them. We do our best to combat disinformation and remain available to answer any questions you may have. “
This week, the company put a status message, which the company spokesperson referred to earlier in the story, the WhatsApp equivalent of Facebook stories, at the top of the People Status section. Tapping on the status revealed a series of messages from the company debunking the rumors.
“WhatsApp does not share your contacts with Facebook,” said the former. Two more status updates clarified that WhatsApp cannot see people’s location and cannot read or listen to encrypted personal conversations. “We are committed to respecting your privacy,” read the last message.
On Thursday, employees posed several questions to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ahead of a weekly question-and-answer session, according to internal communications seen by BuzzFeed News. Some wanted to know if the growing shift to Signal and Telegram was affecting WhatsApp usage and growth metrics. Others wanted the CEO to consider whether or not Facebook was using metadata from WhatsApp to serve ads.
“Do you think we could have done a better job by clearly explaining [the new privacy policy] to users? Someone asked.
“The public is enraged @ WhatsApp PrivPolicy change,” another person commented. “The distrust of FB is so high that we should be more careful about it
Ryan Mac contributed reporting.
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