WHATSAPP THE WHATIDEA

HOW trust in WhatApp spreads untruth........... Should the world worry about WhatsApp? Has it become a virulent force on global misinformation and political trickery ?

Or, rather, should the world rejoice about WhatsApp? After all, hasn't it provided a way for people everywhere to communicate securely with encrypted messages,beyond the reach of government surveillance.

These and  deep and complicated questions. But the answer to all of them is  simple : Yes.

In recent months, the messaging app, which is owned by Facebook and has more than 1.5 billion  users world wise, has raised frightening new political and social dynamics.

In BRAZIL, which is in a bruising  national election campaign, WhatsApp has become a primary vector  for conspiracy theories and other political misinformation.

WhatsApp played a similar role in Kenya's elections last year. In India, this year, false messages  about child kidnappers have gone viral on WhatsApp, leading to mob violence that has killed dozens of people.

WhatsApp said it was working to reduce the spread of  misinformation on the service. Critics charge that  it is not doing enough - and there is some merit to their claims.

Yet the deeper you dig into the problems, they more intractable they seem to be, even if the company were moving heaven and earth to fix them.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. WhatsApp isn't a social network. It is mostly a bare-bone  texting app in which most conversations are private and unmediated by any kind of algorithm meant to amp up management.

This design means WhatsApp has little  has little control over what content takes off and what doesn't in most cases, the company cannot even see what is happening on WhatsApp, because the  service encrypts messages automatically.

That means the real problem may be not so much WhatsApp  the company or WhatsApp the product but something more fundamental - WhatsApp the idea. 

The honor and serving of the latest operational research on WhatsApp continues. The World students Society thanks author Farhad Manjoo.