WHATSAPP! -GODSEND- WHATSPREAD?

HOW TRUST in WhatsApp spreads untruth...........

WHEN you offer everyone access to free and private communication, lots of wonderful things may happen - and WhatsApp  has been a godsend to vulnerable population like migrants, dissidents and political activists.

But a lot of terrible things are bound to happen, too - and it might be impossible to eliminate the bad without muzzling the good.

In this light, WhatsApp  is a powerful and permanent new reality and its problems aren't likely to be solved as much as fitfully and sometimes managed.

For better of for worse, we are going to have to learn to live with it.

''I thought WhatsApp  would be a very dark place, a wild place, where all these conspiracy would be spreading and we wouldn't know what they were talking about,'' said Yasodara Cordova a fellow at   DigitalHKS , a center at  Harvard's Kennedy School that examines the role of digital technologies play in government.

Ms. Cordova has been working on Comprova, a  fact-checking project to monitor social media sites during Brazil's election.

''But what I learned is that the stories on WhatsApp  are common to all the media here,'' she said.

What sets WhatsApp apart is speed and reach, Ms. Cordova said. In Brazil, more than  120 million people use the service, which is offered free as part of mobile internet plans.

[That is, using WhatsApp  does not count against people's data rate].

As it does in other big markets     -India,  South Africa, Saudi Arabia and much of Europe    -WhatsApp functions in Brazil as an all-purpose  communications tool.

It is used for chatting and joking, for trading photos and memes, for news, for political activity and more.

Because of the  centrality, Ms. Cordova argued that the problem on WhatsApp  in Brazil were mainly a function of the country's broken political and media environment.

''For example, we don't really have public libraries in Brazil,'' she said.

''We don;t have a lot of sources of what people would consider reliable information      -and the lack of good sources of information reinforces their beliefs when they see something false on WhatsApp or Facebook.''

The Honor and Serving of the latest Global Operational Research on WhatsApp continues. The World Students Society thanks author and researcher Farhad Manjoo.