COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW – 23/08/2018
Himanshu Gupta and Harsh Taneja
Fake news spreads widely and unchecked on WhatsApp. The platform’s executives and representatives claims that because WhatsApp is an end-to-end encrypted network, there’s little they can do to stop this. But we believe that even though WhatsApp cannot read content of messages, it has access to and uses the metadata. We argue and demonstrate how, by using metadata and human content moderation, WhatsApp could stop the spread of fake news, remove misinformation from its network, and even punish bad actors. This approach would prove far more effective than the company’s current efforts at slowing down the spread of all information.