Opinion: India could see the next 'WhatsApp election' — and the stakes couldn’t be higher
The Whatsapp application logo on a smartphone screen in Beijing. By Chinmayi Arun April 25 at 12:56 PM Chinmayi Arun is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University and was the founder director of the Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University Delhi.
Over the past year, India has seen cascades of rumors spread through WhatsApp with the same techniques used to great effect in Brazil: Public links allow people to join political WhatsApp groups. As rumors spread, they transition from political groups to general and personal groups and can even be picked up and amplified by the mass media. Research conducted after the Brazilian election found evidence that bots were used to forward misinformation from group to group.
The ruling party has already been criticized for collecting metadata from the phones of people who install the prime minister’s “NaMo” app. If it somehow gained access to metadata from WhatsApp, one of the most popular social media apps in the country, it could map networks of voters who are in contact with each other. The potential for misuse of this data is obvious: A party would be able to target propaganda to affinity groups, giving it an unfair advantage.
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