What an article. It turns out that, according to the Guardian, what's wrong with WhatsApp is exactly the best features of WhatsApp, namely the fact that messages are encrypted and can't be snooped on and that you can only send messages to contacts. These things make it hard for governments to snoop on your messages, censor them, and spread official propaganda in their place. Apparently these are all bad things, and we should move back to more public platforms where our conversations can be properly monitored.
The article uses the example of Covid misinformation spreading virally on WA, and while it's true that the information being spread is false (in the examples that they give), it's appalling that their first instinct is to bewail the fact that people's private communications cannot be surveilled and suppressed. This article literally and unironically contains the sentence: "But what makes WhatsApp potentially more dangerous than public social media are the higher levels of trust and honesty that are often present in private groups."
Yes, trust and honesty. That is what's wrong with WhatsApp.
The article is meandering and hence misses what I think is the fundamental problem with whatsapp - it's not encryption or groups but forwarding. Almost everything wrong with whatsapp can be explained by the absolute simplicity of forwarding crap in whatsapp, and that is frankly not a feature you can consider a tenet of free expression or privacy. I'd argue that reigning in on the viral aspect of whatsapp is what we should focus on.
> that is frankly not a feature you can consider a tenet of free expression or privacy
Why not? Isn't passing information on to other people in your social circle part of free expression? And isn't the fact that it is within your social circle part of privacy?
Passing information on to to other people is fine. However, in this case, why forwarding? If you are convinced by the information, why not do an effort and post it yourself in the group?
I found this extract summarizing well Author's POV "This means that while groups can generate high levels of solidarity, which can in principle be put to powerful political effect, it also becomes harder to express disagreement within the group. If, for example, an outspoken and popular member of a neighbourhood WhatsApp group begins to circulate misinformation about health risks, the general urge to maintain solidarity means that their messages are likely to be met with approval and thanks. When a claim or piece of content shows up in a group, there may be many members who view it as dubious; the question is whether they have the confidence to say as much. Meanwhile, the less sceptical can simply forward it on. It’s not hard, then, to understand why WhatsApp is a powerful distributor of “fake news” and conspiracy theories."
> Passing information on to to other people is fine. However, in this case, why forwarding? If you are convinced by the information, why not do an effort and post it yourself in the group?
If you are convinced by a presentation of some information that someone else has already done, why go to all the trouble of doing your own presentation of the same information, when you can just point to what has already been done? I don't see how that isn't part of free expression. Free expression doesn't mean you have to re-say everything yourself at tedious length.
Basically the author is complaining that when people have free expression, some of the things they freely express will be false. Yes, that's correct. Welcome to the real world.
> Yes, trust and honesty. That is what's wrong with WhatsApp.
The quote was it made WhatsApp “potentially more dangerous”. Bad information spread through a trusted relationship can be dangerous for obvious reasons. Marketers and influencers use this all the time, it’s something they strive to achieve because a friend telling you about product X is far more effective than the manufacturer of product X.
That said, I don’t think that WhatsApp is much different from any other social network in how this can be exploited, though one difference is that everything you receive comes from your ’trusted’ group. But the ability to monitor communications is not the answer, helping people to become more critical thinkers might be. That would empower people rather than suppress them though, so guess which option the authoritarians prefer?
In India, WhatsApp is used to hilt by political parties. Ruling party owns one of the largest digital network with 100s of thousands of such groups with 10s of millions of members. These groups are used to circulate all kinds of fake news, Islamophobic posts, even hyper local fake posts which have resulted in lynching of innocents by the mob.
These posts then spill over to non political groups and are
compounded by the fact that media is corrupt and silo-ed into factions.
This a genuine problem impacting impacting both democracy and the social fabric.
end-to-end encryption makes it immune to surveillance
This is absolutely, 100% false. Encryption is fallible. Even if the encryption scheme is unbreakable, end-to-end encryption is no more secure than its weaker end.
Not to mention that many people use Google to back up all of their WhatsApp messages, and we know that Google has given the federal government a great amount of access to its data in the past.
I personally really like Reuter's stance on WhatsApp, which is that it's not as secure as Signal, so they don't use it anymore. Meanwhile the Guardian is publishing anti-encryption articles and still offering only SecureDrop (overkill and inconvenient for a conversation), encrypted email, and snail mail for anonymous tips and such.
Only scanned it, but it looks like everything the article says about Whatsapp (spread of misinformation, coordination of violence) would still fit if you replaced Whatsapp with "SMS" or "text messages".
The article uses the example of Covid misinformation spreading virally on WA, and while it's true that the information being spread is false (in the examples that they give), it's appalling that their first instinct is to bewail the fact that people's private communications cannot be surveilled and suppressed. This article literally and unironically contains the sentence: "But what makes WhatsApp potentially more dangerous than public social media are the higher levels of trust and honesty that are often present in private groups."
Yes, trust and honesty. That is what's wrong with WhatsApp.