Mozilla urges WhatsApp to combat misinformation ahead of global elections

In 2024, four billion people — about half the world’s population — in 64 countries including large democracies like the US and India, will head to the polls. Social media companies like Meta, YouTube and TikTok, have promised to protect the integrity of those elections, at least as far as discourse and factual claims being made on their platforms are concerned. Missing from the conversation, however, is closed messaging app WhatsApp, which now rivals public social media platforms in both scope and reach. That absence has researchers from non-profit Mozilla worried.

“Almost 90% of the safety interventions pledged by Meta ahead of these elections are focused on Facebook and Instagram,” Odanga Madung, a senior researcher at Mozilla focused on elections and platform integrity, told Engadget. “Why has Meta not publicly committed to a public road map of exactly how it’s going to protect elections within [WhatsApp]?”

Over the last ten years, WhatsApp, which Meta (then Facebook) bought for $19 billion in 2014, has become the default way for most of the world outside the US to communicate. In 2020, WhatsApp announced that it had more than two billion users around …read more