People are receiving messages warning them that people in their area are going to murder people and sell their body parts. Those suspected of being behind the crimes are beaten, lynched and killed.
It is a pattern that is being played out repeatedly throughout India. And the tragedy is that the messages are entirely fake, the men being beaten and killed entirely innocent.
The messages – which often describe horrifying crimes such as child abuse or organ harvesting – are being passed over WhatsApp, in a trend that is growing as the country gains access to the internet and to the communication technologies that it brings.
12 useful WhatsApp features you didn’t know existed
1/12 Unsend messages
You can unsend a message by tapping and holding it, hitting the Delete symbol and selecting Delete for Everyone. The feature works for all types of messages, but only if they were sent less than seven minutes ago.
2/12 Dodge the blue ticks
WhatsApp’s blue ticks show when sent messages have been read, but you can disable them buy going to Settings > Account > Privacy > Read Receipts. However, bear in mind that, by doing so, you’ll lose the ability to see when your own sent messages have been read.
Another, more fiddly way of reading your messages without triggering the blue ticks, is enabling Aeroplane Mode before opening your messages – just remember to close the app before switching Aeroplane Mode off again.
3/12 Hide your ‘last seen’ time
Prevent your friends from finding out when you were last online by hiding your last seen time. Go to Settings > Account > Privacy > Last Seen. As is the case with disabling read receipts, hiding your ‘last seen’ time will also stop you from seeing anybody else’s.
4/12 Limit data usage
You can control how much data you munch through on WhatsApp by limiting the types of media you automatically download on a mobile connection. Go to Settings > Data Usage and choose the best option for you.
5/12 Customise notifications
If you’re expecting an important WhatsApp message from someone, set a custom notification for them by opening the chat, tapping their name at the top and hitting Custom Notifications.
6/12 Format your messages
To jazz up any of your messages, simply highlight it by tapping and holding it, hit the More Options key on the pop-up menu and tap the formatting option you want – bold, italic, strikethrough or monospace.
7/12 Type hands-free
You can get Siri or Google Assistant to type your WhatsApp messages out for you by saying either “Hey Siri” or “Okay Google”, followed by the name of the person you want to message and the actual contents of the message.
8/12 Mark chats as unread
When you’ve read a message but can’t reply to it straight away, you can set a visual reminder by marking it as unread. On Android, long-press the conversation, and on iOS, swipe from left to right on a chat.
9/12 Email entire conversations
You almost certainly won’t do this on a regular basis, but it’s a handy option to have. You can export entire conversations – complete with emoji and media attachments – by hitting More inside a chat a selecting Email Chat.
10/12 Mass-message contacts
You can send the same message to lots of your contacts without lumping them all into one group, much like the BCC option on email, by hitting the New Broadcast option on the app’s main menu.
11/12 Pin conversations
You pin up to three contacts and groups to the top of your WhatsApp conversation list by tapping and holding a chat, then hitting the pin icon.
12/12 Make things easier to find
You can easily mark key messages with a star, allowing you to find them easily when you need to. Just tap and hold a message and hit the star icon to save it, and return to it later by selecting Starred Messages in WhatsApp’s main menu.
1/12 Unsend messages
You can unsend a message by tapping and holding it, hitting the Delete symbol and selecting Delete for Everyone. The feature works for all types of messages, but only if they were sent less than seven minutes ago.
2/12 Dodge the blue ticks
WhatsApp’s blue ticks show when sent messages have been read, but you can disable them buy going to Settings > Account > Privacy > Read Receipts. However, bear in mind that, by doing so, you’ll lose the ability to see when your own sent messages have been read.
Another, more fiddly way of reading your messages without triggering the blue ticks, is enabling Aeroplane Mode before opening your messages – just remember to close the app before switching Aeroplane Mode off again.
3/12 Hide your ‘last seen’ time
Prevent your friends from finding out when you were last online by hiding your last seen time. Go to Settings > Account > Privacy > Last Seen. As is the case with disabling read receipts, hiding your ‘last seen’ time will also stop you from seeing anybody else’s.
4/12 Limit data usage
You can control how much data you munch through on WhatsApp by limiting the types of media you automatically download on a mobile connection. Go to Settings > Data Usage and choose the best option for you.
5/12 Customise notifications
If you’re expecting an important WhatsApp message from someone, set a custom notification for them by opening the chat, tapping their name at the top and hitting Custom Notifications.
6/12 Format your messages
To jazz up any of your messages, simply highlight it by tapping and holding it, hit the More Options key on the pop-up menu and tap the formatting option you want – bold, italic, strikethrough or monospace.
7/12 Type hands-free
You can get Siri or Google Assistant to type your WhatsApp messages out for you by saying either “Hey Siri” or “Okay Google”, followed by the name of the person you want to message and the actual contents of the message.
8/12 Mark chats as unread
When you’ve read a message but can’t reply to it straight away, you can set a visual reminder by marking it as unread. On Android, long-press the conversation, and on iOS, swipe from left to right on a chat.
9/12 Email entire conversations
You almost certainly won’t do this on a regular basis, but it’s a handy option to have. You can export entire conversations – complete with emoji and media attachments – by hitting More inside a chat a selecting Email Chat.
10/12 Mass-message contacts
You can send the same message to lots of your contacts without lumping them all into one group, much like the BCC option on email, by hitting the New Broadcast option on the app’s main menu.
11/12 Pin conversations
You pin up to three contacts and groups to the top of your WhatsApp conversation list by tapping and holding a chat, then hitting the pin icon.
12/12 Make things easier to find
You can easily mark key messages with a star, allowing you to find them easily when you need to. Just tap and hold a message and hit the star icon to save it, and return to it later by selecting Starred Messages in WhatsApp’s main menu.
Local officials have pleaded with people not to believe or spread rumours circulated over social media. But they continue to spread, people continue to believe them – and that trust continues to have horrifying consequences in the real world.
WhatsApp is of course not spreading the hoaxes and rumours intentionally, and is not responsible for creating it. But many of the technologies that are otherwise thought of as features are being abused to spread false information: it allows information to spread incredibly quickly, without any oversight or way of tracing where it came from.
“Sadly some people also use WhatsApp to spread harmful misinformation,” WhatsApp said in a statement to Reuters. “We’re stepping up our education efforts so that people know about our safety features and how to spot fake news and hoaxes.”
Police in India this week said they had arrested 23 people over the lynching of five men suspected of being members of a gang of child kidnappers. It is just the latest of a series of deadly mob attacks, which are being fuelled by fast-spreading, hoaxes and rumours being spread online.
Police spokesman M Ramkumar said that the village had been abuzz for days with rumours spread through WhatsApp that a gang of child kidnappers were roaming around.
That meant that when five men from a nomadic community and had gone to a house to ask for food, they were suspected of being part of that rumoured gang, New Delhi Television reported. Those men were then killed, with the TV station showing a community centre splashed with blood where the men were locked up before they were brutally killed with sticks, rods and stones, as well as punches.
At least 20 people have been killed in similar attacks, and dozens more have been injured. The killings do not appear to be slowing.
Part of the reason that WhatsApp has become so central in the attacks is that it is simply incredibly popular; it is simply the way that any information spreads, for good or bad.
India has more than 200 million WhatsApp users, and it is easily the app’s biggest market in the world. And it is continuing to grow: there are more than a billion phone subscribers who use a wide variety of social media platforms.
But WhatsApp is also specific in that it allows people to pass on information in a way that is unusually disconnected from its source. On public social media sites, information tends to be shared alongside where it has come from – either a link to a site or a post – but WhatsApp allows that context to be removed, simply by forwarding or broadcasting text quickly to an entire network.
WhatsApp has been testing technological responses to that problem, flagging forwarded text to make sure that people know it is the result of a round robin rather than having being written by the person sending them.
A WhatsApp message, however, is only a piece of text. The test only flags those messages that use the app’s “forward” feature – so it doesn’t track that those have simply been copy and pasted, or which simply restate information that has been heard somewhere else.
The fact that WhatsApp is entirely encrypted – a security not afforded on other more public platforms, or even many private ones – also means that those sharing such messages cannot actually be found. Authorities have repeatedly called for WhatsApp to weaken its encryption to allow police to read it, but the company has argued that doing so would also make the entire app insecure for everyone.
Privacy advocates fear that the new concern about hoaxes and rumours could be used to crackdown on discussion generally, and could serve as a useful excuse for organisations that want to weaken encryption for their own purposes. India has seemed increasingly interested in storing more data in the country and encouraging tech firms to allow authorities to have access to it.
The app does appear still to be mostly used for purposes entirely separate from the hoax messages. Those messages often spread through groups texts – but they are a tiny minority, with 90 per cent of messages being sent between two people, according to WhatsApp.
Even the hoax messages themselves don’t tend to discuss the horrifying kind of crimes that lead to the attacks that are spreading across India. They often discuss stories of false jobs or fake medical advice, which spread quickly among people hoping they can prove useful to friends.
Messaging platforms are often used to spread news of the attacks after they have happened, too. The killings are often captured on mobile phones and then spread to social media, where they quickly spread across Indian states.
