WhatsApp said its role in US politics is limited (representational)
Oakland:
New Jersey tech entrepreneur Arun Bantval is US presidential candidate Joe Biden’s main watchdog on the WhatsApp messaging service about the Democrat and his Indo-American Vice President Kamala Harris.
Messages on WhatsApp, owned by Facebook Inc, are confidential and cannot be seen by moderators who monitor memes, claims and other misleading content on the social media giant’s flagship platform. Two billion users rely on the free WhatsApp app to chat with individuals and groups of up to 256 people.
Bantval, 56, who chairs the five-member Biden campaign rapid response team focused on South Asian voters, followed dozens of disturbing messages of unknown origin and designed around 50 rebuttal graphics and text in the past three months.
His team and similar members of non-partisan groups are trying to fill the WhatsApp moderation void by joining large WhatsApp groups and asking community leaders to report things.
Fighting fake news on social media such as Facebook and Twitter has become standard practice for campaigns. But covert messaging apps like WhatsApp have flown under the radar despite serving as a crucial political forum among middle-aged Indians, Latinxes, and other immigrant groups.
South Asian voters, mostly Native Americans, will play a pivotal role in the Nov. 3 contest in swing states such as Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, where the results will be close and predict the national result, according to researchers and advocacy groups for the non-partisan vote.
About 72% of registered Indo-American voters plan to support Biden, according to a September poll by Carnegie Endowment. But Biden’s South Asian supporters and non-partisan activists fear disinformation on WhatsApp could affect participation and support.
“There is just a lot of inaccurate information for an already confusing process,” said Chavi Khanna Koneru, executive director of the non-partisan North Carolina Asian Americans Together. “And this year is different for everyone because we rely more than ever on virtual connections.
Every day, users can receive hundreds of memes, videos, voicemails, and texts including greetings, social invitations, and political propaganda. Users regularly transmit shocking and humorous messages, with the name of the original sender automatically deleted, making it difficult to track them.
“It’s almost like going viral on Facebook,” Bantval said.
WhatsApp has said its role in US politics is limited. But political disinformation on WhatsApp in Brazil, India and elsewhere prompted the service from 2018 to limit recipients when forwarding messages.
It also introduced a chatbot that users can message to access fact-checks by internationally recognized organizations. But when Reuters asked the system for topics in messages sent to South Asian voters, it produced no results.
WhatsApp also said users can search the web from heavily forwarded messages to find relevant fact checks, although Reuters has yet to find any related results.
A campaign spokeswoman for outgoing Republican President Donald Trump said WhatsApp was not a priority for his social media staff. But some misleading messages on the app target it at racial justice policies and alleged extramarital affairs, according to Indian voters on both sides.
“There is more on the Democratic candidates, but there is also fake news on the Republican side,” said Kannan Srinivasan, an Orlando businessman.
Exploit fears
It is not known where the disinformation on WhatsApp is coming from or whether the examples seen by Bantval and others are part of organized efforts. They said the spelling and wording suggests some authors are Indian residents who view Trump as better for bilateral relations.
Messages seen by Reuters and sent to Swing State voters portray Biden’s views on Pakistan, Islam, China, taxation and the police in ways debunked by fact-checking groups.
Bantval said the misrepresentation tackled the concerns of older Indian immigrants about crime, wealth and religion.
Other messages sent to South Asian voters in Texas and North Carolina, seen by Reuters, contain false claims that ballots will not count when voters choose a Democrat in every contest or when election officials sign the cast ballots.
Koneru estimated that his North Carolina group spent around 15% of his time correcting inaccuracies in voting procedures on WhatsApp and other popular services, up from 2% in the 2016 presidential election.
“We’re doing our best to step in and clarify, but there are so many WhatsApp groups,” she said.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
