As trust in groups grows, so it is withdrawn from public institutions and officials. As Facebook, Twitter and Instagram become increasingly theatrical – every gesture geared to impress an audience or deflect criticism – WhatsApp has become a sanctuary from a confusing and untrustworthy world, where users can speak more frankly.
#WATSAPP PLUS#
On the plus side, this means intimacy with those we care about and an ability to speak freely on the negative side, it injects an ethos of secrecy and suspicion into the public sphere. Unlike so many other social media platforms, WhatsApp is built to secure privacy. The political threat of WhatsApp is the flipside of its psychological appeal. The capacity to circulate misinformation and allegations is becoming greater than the capacity to resolve them. As also demonstrated by closed Facebook groups, discontents – not always well-founded – accumulate in private before boiling over in public. WhatsApp groups can not only breed suspicion among the public, but also manufacture a mood of suspicion among their own participants. Secretive coordination – both real and imagined – does not strengthen confidence in democracy. Meanwhile, the Conservative party’s pro-Brexit European Research Group was said to be chiefly sustained in the form of a WhatsApp group, whose membership was never public. Media commentators who defended Corbyn were often accused of belonging to a WhatsApp group of “outriders”, co-ordinated by Corbyn’s office, which supposedly told them what line to take. Back in Britain’s pre-Covid-19 days, when Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn were the issues that provoked the most feverish political discussions, speculation and paranoia swirled around such groups. But even away from such visible disruptions, WhatsApp does seem to be an unusually effective vehicle for sowing distrust in public institutions and processes.Ī WhatsApp group can exist without anyone outside the group knowing of its existence, who its members are or what is being shared, while end-to-end encryption makes it immune to surveillance from third parties. In March, a WhatsApp spokesperson told the Washington Post that the company had “engaged health ministries around the world to provide simple ways for citizens to receive accurate information about the virus”. WhatsApp has also taken some steps to limit its use as a vehicle for misinformation. Photograph: Ueslei Marcelino/ReutersĪs ever, there is a risk of pinning too much blame for complex political crises on an inert technology. India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has sought ways of regulating WhatsApp content, though this has led to new controversies about government infringement on civil liberties.īrazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro with a printout of an opponent’s WhatsApp message about him. In India, there have also been reports of riots and at least 30 deaths linked to rumours circulating on WhatsApp. While the “fake news” scandals surrounding the 2016 electoral upsets in the UK and US were more focused upon Facebook – which owns WhatsApp – subsequent electoral victories for Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Narendra Modi in India were aided by incendiary WhatsApp messaging, exploiting the vast reach of the app in these countries. This was not the first time that WhatsApp has been embroiled in controversy. Meanwhile, the app was also enabling the spread of fake audio clips, such as a widely shared recording in which someone who claimed to work for the NHS reported that ambulances would no longer be sent to assist people with breathing difficulties. Some feared that the very same community groups created during March were now accelerating the spread of the 5G conspiracy theory. WhatsApp, along with Facebook and YouTube, was a key channel through which the conspiracy theory proliferated.
Across the UK, people began setting fire to 5G masts, with 20 arson attacks over the Easter weekend alone. A conspiracy theory about the rollout of 5G, which originated long before Covid-19 had appeared, now claimed that mobile phone masts were responsible for the disease. Yet by mid-April, the role that WhatsApp was playing in the pandemic looked somewhat darker. Families and friends used the app to stay close, sharing their fears and concerns in real time. Mutual aid groups sprung up to help the vulnerable. At first, many of the new uses were heartening.
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