Can WhatsApp Counter Misinformation by Limiting Message Forwarding?

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of WhatsApp's message forwarding limits in curbing misinformation spread, using epidemiological modeling and real-world data from Brazil, India, and Indonesia.

Contribution

It introduces a methodology combining epidemiological models and empirical data to assess messaging restrictions' impact on misinformation propagation.

Findings

Forwarding limits delay misinformation spread significantly.

Restrictions are ineffective in stopping high-virality misinformation in public groups.

Current measures only provide partial mitigation against rapid misinformation campaigns.

Abstract

WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app in the world. The closed nature of the app, in addition to the ease of transferring multimedia and sharing information to large-scale groups make WhatsApp unique among other platforms, where an anonymous encrypted messages can become viral, reaching multiple users in a short period of time. The personal feeling and immediacy of messages directly delivered to the user's phone on WhatsApp was extensively abused to spread unfounded rumors and create misinformation campaigns during recent elections in Brazil and India. WhatsApp has been deploying measures to mitigate this problem, such as reducing the limit for forwarding a message to at most five users at once. Despite the welcomed effort to counter the problem, there is no evidence so far on the real effectiveness of such restrictions. In this work, we propose a methodology to evaluate the effectiveness of such measures on the spreading of misinformation circulating on WhatsApp. We use an epidemiological model and real data gathered from WhatsApp in Brazil, India and Indonesia to assess the impact of limiting virality features in this kind of network. Our results suggest that the current efforts deployed by WhatsApp can offer significant delays on the information spread, but they are ineffective in blocking the propagation of misinformation campaigns through public groups when the content has a high viral nature.