Tracing the love-hate relationship between WhatsApp and India

It’s complicated. Indians love WhatsApp; what’s not to love — you can forward jokes, pictures and gossip, all for free. WhatsApp loves India — the multi-crore population presents a lucrative market. The Centre, however, is ever-wary of the messaging platform, and the friction has led to a chequered relationship between the two.

After several rounds of talks and debates, the messaging platform from the Meta stable has agreed to meet certain norms imposed by the Centre. For starters, it is disclosing information on how many accounts it closes each month.

Accounts closure

WhatsApp recently said it banned 16.6 lakh Indian users in the month of April to prevent “harmful activity”. This was disclosed in the monthly report published in accordance with Rule 4(1)(d) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.

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Since the new IT rules came into effect in India, WhatsApp, as per its monthly reports published from July 15, 2021, to June 1, 2022, has banned more than 2.16 crore Indian users from the platform to prevent “harmful activity”.

Between May 15, 2021, and April 30, 2022, the period  June 16 to July 31, 2021 saw the highest number of accounts suspended – 30 lakh.

Action on accounts is taken when complaints are received from users in India via the grievance mechanisms of WhatsApp. In addition to responding to and actioning on user complaints through the grievance channel, WhatsApp also deploys tools and resources to prevent harmful behaviour on the platform.

“We are particularly focused on prevention because we believe it is much better to stop harmful activity from happening in the first place than to detect it after harm has occurred,” the platform said in its monthly report.

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“We respond to all grievances received except in cases where a grievance is deemed to be a duplicate of a previous ticket. An account is ‘actioned’ when an account is banned or a previously banned account is restored, as a result of a complaint,” it added.

According to WhatsApp, there are more than 400 million users on its platform in India, and it remains “deeply committed” to keeping its users safe online. Over 90% of messages sent on WhatsApp are individual, one on one, conversations. “The majority of groups on WhatsApp are less than 10 people and we do not provide a way to discover or browse users or groups from within our app,” it said.

‘Forwards’ restriction

Apart from taking action on accounts in India as per the new IT rules, WhatsApp has previously taken measures to curb sharing of misinformation or fake news on its platform after the Government of India raised concerns.

In July 2018, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) had written to WhatsApp urging it to take immediate steps to tackle the menace of misuse of the platform wherein inflammatory messages were circulated that led to unfortunate incidents.

WhatsApp had responded indicating its initiative to mark forwarded messages and to step up efforts to detect fake news.

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According to WhatsApp, in India, people forward more messages, photos, and videos than any other country in the world.

After testing a feature where a user can forward a message to only five chats at once, WhatsApp rolled it out in 2019.

“WhatsApp carefully evaluated this test and listened to user feedback over a six-month period… We set a limit on forwarding messages to just five chats at once, making WhatsApp one of the few technology companies to intentionally constrain sharing. This reduced the amount of forwarded messages on WhatsApp by over 25%,” it said.

WhatsApp vs Indian government

While the Meta-owned messaging platform complied with the new IT rules and is publishing monthly reports, not long ago, WhatsApp had sued the Indian government over the same rules including “traceability”.

“It is pertinent to note that the rule to trace the first originator of information is mandatory for each and every significant social media intermediary, irrespective of their method of operation… The government respects the Right of Privacy and has no intention to violate it when WhatsApp is required to disclose the origin of a particular message,” the MeitY had said in May 2018.

WhatsApp had opposed this and called it a “new form of mass surveillance”.

“Some governments are seeking to force technology companies to find out who sent a particular message on private messaging services. This concept is called ‘traceability’,” it said.

“Technology and privacy experts have determined that traceability breaks end-to-end encryption and would severely undermine the privacy of billions of people who communicate digitally. Reasonable and proportionate regulations for an increasingly digital world are important, but eroding privacy for everyone, violating human rights, and putting innocent people at risk is not the solution. WhatsApp is committed to doing all we can to protect the privacy of people’s personal messages, which is why we join others in opposing traceability,” it added.

Further it said, “WhatsApp deployed end-to-end encryption throughout our app in 2016, so that calls, messages, photos, videos, and voice notes to friends and family are only shared with the intended recipient and no one else (not even us). ‘Traceability’ is intended to do the opposite by requiring private messaging services like WhatsApp to keep track of who-said-what and who-shared-what for billions of messages sent every day.

“Traceability requires messaging services to store information that can be used to ascertain the content of people’s messages, thereby breaking the very guarantees that end-to-end encryption provides. In order to trace even one message, services would have to trace every message. That’s because there is no way to predict which message a government would want to investigate in the future. In doing so, a government that chooses to mandate traceability is effectively mandating a new form of mass surveillance.”

Then IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had put the onus on WhatsApp by saying, “The Government of India is committed to ensuring Right of Privacy to all its citizens as well as have the means and the information necessary to ensure public order and maintain national security. It is WhatsApp’s responsibility to find a technical solution, whether through encryption or otherwise, that both happen.”

‘WhatsApp elections’

Ahead of the general election in 2019, the BJP’s IT cell head Amit Malviya told Economic Times, “The upcoming elections will be fought on the mobile phone… In a way, you could say they would be WhatsApp elections.”

A BBC report said WhatsApp had “become a vehicle for misinformation and propaganda”.

“Both of the main parties – the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the opposition Congress – are exploiting the power of WhatsApp to try to influence India’s 900 million eligible voters,” the report said.

However, WhatsApp said it supports safe elections and trains political parties ahead of elections. “Political parties are trained ahead of all elections to promote an understanding of the importance of using WhatsApp responsibly. The training cautions party-workers that their accounts could become banned if they send WhatsApp messages to users without prior user-consent.”

“In 2019, WhatsApp set up a high priority channel with Election Commission of India (ECI) as part of an industry initiative and observes the voluntary code of ethics with a view to assist ECI in conducting free and transparent elections. WhatsApp maintains regular engagements with ECI officials to keep them updated on the approach to Indian elections and to discuss methods of working together more effectively.”

It also cautioned political parties over sending bulk messages. “Don’t bulk message, auto-message, or auto-dial using WhatsApp. WhatsApp uses both machine learning technology and reports from users to detect and ban accounts that send unwanted automated messages.”

While the issues of fake news and misinformation continue to be major concerns on WhatsApp, the platform says, “We will continue to bring more transparency to our work and include more information about our efforts in future (monthly) reports”.