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Hours after WhatsApp announced a new privacy policy for nearly 2 billion people around the world who use it, rumors flew fast and thick.
“Don’t accept the new WhatsApp policy,” said one of the messages that went viral on the platform. “After doing this, 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 ads based on your chats,” said another. “Don’t accept the new policy!”
Thousands of similar messages went viral on WhatsApp, Facebook’s instant messaging app, in the days that followed. Encouraged by celebrities like Tesla CEO Elon Musk and whistleblower Edward Snowden, millions of people rushed to download WhatsApp alternatives like Signal and Telegram.
There was only one problem: from the 4,000-word policy, it was clear that the new changes applied only if people used WhatsApp to chat with companies, not for private conversations with friends and family.
No, the new terms would not allow Facebook to read its WhatsApp chats, the company explained to anyone who asked. Top executives posted long strands to Twitter and gave interviews to major publications in India, the company’s largest market. WhatsApp spent millions buying front-page ads in major newspapers and released graphics unmasking rumors on its website with a large “Share on WhatsApp” button, hoping to inject some truth into the flow of disinformation that circulated through its platform. The company also encouraged Facebook employees to share these infographics, according to posts on its internal Workplace message board.
“There has been a lot of misinformation and confusion, so we are working to provide accurate information about how WhatsApp protects people’s personal conversations,” a WhatsApp spokesman told BuzzFeed News. “We are using our Status feature to communicate directly with people on WhatsApp, as well as posting accurate information on social networks and on our website in dozens of languages. Of course, we also make these resources available to people who work at our company so that they can answer questions directly to friends and family if they wish. “
None of this worked.
“A lot of misinformation causing concern and we want to help everyone understand our principles and the facts,” wrote WhatsApp on a blog last week, announcing that the company would delay the new privacy policy for three months. “We will also do much more to clear up misinformation about how privacy and security work on WhatsApp,” he wrote.
Thanks to everyone who got in touch. We are still working to avoid any confusion by communicating directly with @WhatsApp users. No one will have their account suspended or deleted on February 8 and we will return our business plans until after May – https://t.co/H3DeSS0QfO
Twitter
For years, rumors and rumors that have spread through WhatsApp have fueled a crisis of disinformation in some of the most populous countries in the world, such as Brazil and India, where the app is the main form of communication between people. Now, this crisis has hit the company itself.
“Trust in platforms is [at a] rock bottom, ”Claire Wardle, co-founder and director of First Draft, a non-profit researching disinformation, told BuzzFeed News. “For years, people have been increasingly concerned with the power of technology companies, especially with an awareness of the amount of data they are collecting about us. So when privacy policies are changed, people are concerned with what that means ”.
Wardle said people are concerned that WhatsApp connects their behavior in the app to the data in their Facebook accounts.
“Facebook and WhatsApp have a huge deficit of confidence,” 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 readily 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 the confusion that misinformation thrives,” said Wardle, “so people saw changes in policies, came to hasty conclusions and, unsurprisingly, many people believed the rumor.”
These patterns of misinformation that have thrived on WhatsApp for years have often caused damage. In 2013, a video went viral in Muzaffarnagar, a city in northern India that reportedly showed two young men being lynched, inciting unrest 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 was not even filmed in India. In Brazil, fake news flooded the platform and was used to favor the extreme right candidate Jair Bolsonaro, who won the 2018 presidential elections in the country.
But the company did not take its disinformation problem seriously until 2018, when rumors about kidnappers of children who swept the platform led to a series of violent lynchings across India. In a note released at the time, India’s IT ministry warned WhatsApp about a lawsuit and said the company would be “treated as an accomplice” if it did not solve the problem, putting WhatsApp in a crisis mode. She transported top executives from the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, to New Delhi, to meet with government officials and journalists, and ran high-level awareness campaigns about disinformation.
Sam Panthaky / Getty Images
A July 2018 protest against lynching of crowds in India. Dozens of people were lynched across the country that year thanks to rumors of WhatsApp, leaving Indian authorities and WhatsApp struggling to find a solution.
It also incorporated new features into the app to tackle misinformation directly for the first time, such as labeling forwarded messages and restricting the number of people or groups that certain content could be forwarded to to decrease viral content. In August last year, it also started allowing people in several countries to upload the text of a message to Google to check whether 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 would allow users to search for images they received on the app with a single touch in 2019, a move that would help people check the facts more easily. 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, so far, do not include India.
“We are still working on the search engine feature,” a WhatsApp spokesman told BuzzFeed News.
WhatsApp said the company wants to provide more clarity about its new privacy policy. “We want to reinforce that this update does not expand our ability to share data with Facebook. Our goal is to offer transparency and new options available to interact with companies so that they can serve their customers and grow, ”said the spokesman. “WhatsApp will always protect personal messages with end-to-end encryption so that neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can see them. We are working to resolve disinformation and remain available to answer any questions. “
This week, the company placed a status message, WhatsApp’s equivalent to a Facebook story, at the top of people’s status section. Touching Status revealed a series of company messages debunking the rumors.
BuzzFeed News images
“WhatsApp does not share its contacts with Facebook,” said the first. 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 your privacy,” read the last message.
On Thursday, employees had several questions for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg before 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 ask whether Facebook used WhatsApp metadata or not to serve ads.
“Do you think we could have done a better job explaining clearly [the new privacy policy] for users? “someone asked.
“The public is furious about the changes to WhatsApp PrivPolicy,” commented another person. “The distrust in FB is so high that we should be more careful with that.”
Ryan Mac contributed reporting.