Like many other countries in the world, Indonesia has been fighting the spread of hoaxes and fake news, a fight that has escalated ahead of the country’s national elections in April. Yesterday, a senior official for Whatsapp in Jakarta announced that the messaging app would impose new global restrictions on the number of times a user can forward a message in an effort to fight the proliferation of fake news.
“Based on research and discussions with several world leaders, we have found that five is the ideal number to avoid the spread of hoaxes,” Victoria Grand, vice president for policy and communications at WhatsApp, said yesterday after meeting with Indonesia’s minister of communications and information technology, Rudiantara, according to a press release from the ministry.
The ministry’s release noted the change would go into effect today at noon, Western Indonesia Time.
The limit currently only applies to Android users of Whatsapp, while the roll out to iOS users is still being implemented. Previously, a WhatsApp user could forward a message to 20 individuals or groups.
Speaking to the media following her meeting with Rudiantara, Victoria said that WhatsApp was very concerned about the spread of hoaxes, slander and hate speech through its application. After consulting with numerous experts, they decided that a further limit on forwards would help minimize the way such news spread.
Victoria noted that the forwarding limit has already been beta tested in India (where Whatsapp has been blamed for the spread of hoaxes that have led to violence and even murder in a few cases) since July.
Minister Rudiantara said he appreciated Whatsapp’s efforts to reduce the spread of hoaxes, but also stressed that the new sharing limit was hardly any guarantee that fake news would not continue to be spread.
“We cannot solve this problem 100 percent, at least we can mitigate the risk. We can mitigate the number to be as low as possible,” Rudiantara is quoted as saying in his ministry’s press release.
But Rudiantara seemed optimistic the new limit would make a difference, noting that the usual way fake news in Indonesia was spread was that it would be first posted to Facebook and then, after it was taken down there, screenshots of it would be shared via Whatsapp.
With over 1.5 billion users, Whatsapp and its parent company, Facebook, have been blamed for the spread of fake news in numerous countries. Experts have been particularly worried about Whatsapp since its closed system and user-to-user encryption makes monitoring the spread of such news extremely difficult.
Indonesians across the country will vote for their next president, as well regional and local leaders, on April 17. Many observers are concerned about the effect that fake news will have on the elections while some others worry the government’s crackdown on hoaxes is a potential threat to civil liberties.
