Can WhatsApp Benefit from Debunked Fact-Checked Stories to Reduce Misinformation?

TL;DR

This paper investigates the spread of misinformation on WhatsApp during elections in Brazil and India, highlighting that fact-checked content continues to circulate and proposing a privacy-preserving architecture for WhatsApp to flag such content.

Contribution

It introduces a novel architecture for WhatsApp to flag fact-checked misinformation without compromising user privacy, leveraging existing fact-checking efforts.

Findings

Misinformation persists in WhatsApp groups despite fact-checking.

A significant portion of misinformation is shared in public groups.

Proposed architecture respects end-to-end encryption while flagging fact-checked content.

Abstract

WhatsApp was alleged to be widely used to spread misinformation and propaganda during elections in Brazil and India. Due to the private encrypted nature of the messages on WhatsApp, it is hard to track the dissemination of misinformation at scale. In this work, using public WhatsApp data, we observe that misinformation has been largely shared on WhatsApp public groups even after they were already fact-checked by popular fact-checking agencies. This represents a significant portion of misinformation spread in both Brazil and India in the groups analyzed. We posit that such misinformation content could be prevented if WhatsApp had a means to flag already fact-checked content. To this end, we propose an architecture that could be implemented by WhatsApp to counter such misinformation. Our proposal respects the current end-to-end encryption architecture on WhatsApp, thus protecting users' privacy while providing an approach to detect the misinformation that benefits from fact-checking efforts.