WhatsApp in India
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2019
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Are fake news and rumours still proliferating on Whatsapp in India? And is this being exploited by candidates as the country prepares to go to the polls?
Pratik Sinha, director of AltNews.in, is fighting an uphill struggle trying to debunk the misinformation and outright deceit they claim can still spread like wildfire among India's 200 million Whatsapp users.
But is fact-checking even the right way to tackle the problem? Or is it just closing the barn door after the fake horse has already bolted? Manuela Saragosa speaks to one sceptic, Rinu Agal of the Indian online news site thePrint.
Meanwhile, Dr Sander van der Linden of the Social Decision-Making Lab at Cambridge University is working with Whatsapp on a possible solution that he believes will inoculate users against viral propaganda.
(Picture: Boys use mobile phones in Delhi; Credit: Nasir Kachroo/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC with me, Manuela Saragossa. |
| 0:06.5 | Coming up, the technology firm that could sway the outcome of India's general election. |
| 0:11.6 | They treat everything that comes on WhatsApp as legit. |
| 0:16.2 | They're not critical towards the information that they're receiving on WhatsApp. |
| 0:20.3 | And there is information coming in these different formats which is regarded as news. |
| 0:25.0 | India's polls have been dubbed the WhatsApp elections, |
| 0:28.0 | even though the instant messaging service has been repeatedly accused of helping spread fake news there. |
| 0:33.5 | So how about inoculating people against fake news? Yes, really. By exposing people to |
| 0:40.5 | weaken doses of strategies that are used to deceive you, you can actually build mental antibodies |
| 0:46.2 | and help people gain resistance against misinformation. What's up with WhatsApp in India? |
| 0:51.7 | Coming up here on Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:57.5 | Tens of millions of Indians began queuing last week to cast their ballots in the first |
| 1:02.9 | phase of the country's general election, dubbed the world's biggest democratic exercise. |
| 1:08.3 | The country is so big that the election will take place over seven phases |
| 1:12.3 | with results due in late May. And the instant messaging app, WhatsApp, is expected to play a key |
| 1:18.7 | role in relaying information during the polls. Now India is WhatsApp's most important market. |
| 1:24.5 | It counts 200 million users there, a number that just keeps growing. |
| 1:29.2 | But WhatsApp has also been used to spread fake news in India with sometimes fatal consequences. |
| 1:36.0 | This one fake WhatsApp message in the last one year has spread like wildfire across 10 states in |
| 1:43.5 | India and killed 23 people. |
| 1:47.0 | This is Bangalore, India's third city. It's modern and diverse. |
| 1:52.0 | It's the heart of the IT industry. |
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