One messaging app is affecting voter opinions in India more than other media put together
- WhatsApp will play a crucial role in the Indian general election 2019.
- Aside from misinformation, the primary concern is that WhatsApp groups will be used to exploit personal for political gain.
- Users in rural India, in particular, have increased since the last general election in 2014.
As the world’s largest democratic exercise kicks off in India, the influence of social media on general election in 2019 may be
even bigger than it was in 2014.
WhatsApp, in particular, is a concern considering that India is its largest market with over 200 million monthly active users and 52% of smartphone users reported using it as a news source in one week.
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Not only does that usage outrank
Snapchat and
Facebook Messenger, but it’s also much higher
compared to other countries around the world as per the India Digital News Report by Reuters. Officials from the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have even
dubbed the upcoming elections as the ‘WhatsApp Elections’.
The issue with ‘fake news’ on WhatsApp
In a country where people generally
don’t trust the news anyway, the increase in the circulation of fake news has 57% of Indians are concerned about what is real and what is fake on the internet.
Even their reasons for being concerned range from facts being manipulated to suit a particular agenda to unwittingly being duped by satire content.
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Not only is the spread of misinformation a concern, there’s also the burgeoning issue of personal data being exploited for political ends — an issue that has only gotten more grave after the Cambridge Analytica data breach
scandal took place in 2018 where data was used to influence the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential election.
Last year, BBC Research found that nationalism was the
driving force behind a lot of the fake news in India. Rather than verify facts, content sharers assert that they’re only bringing the ‘right version’ of the story into the light.
BJP
reportedly assigned some 900,000 people to the specific task of localised WhatsApp campaigning. Amit Shah, the party president, apparently asked state units to compile a list of voters who have smartphones for every polling station.
Congress, the opposing party, is focusing on Facebook to uploading their campaign content but even for them, distribution is
dependant on WhatsApp.
Rural India
More than half of the Indian population resides in rural India, And, since 2014, the usage of WhatsApp by rural India has boomed in particular alongside more and more people coming online. The Digital Empowerment Foundation
found that nearly half of the respondents report that almost everyone in their village is a WhatsApp user.
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