How can WhatsApp control fake news?

India is WhatsApp's largest market in terms of net users with 400 million monthly users according to July 2019 company figures. That equates to more than one-quarter (26.7%) of its total reported user base. India is such a big market for WhatsApp which can be assessed by the fact that the second-largest market for the company is Brazil with 120 million users. In terms of user penetration among smartphone users too, India is among the top three markets for WhatsApp with more than 90% of smartphone users in India using WhatsApp.

Fake news is something that has infested WhatsApp with conspiracy theories, anti-vaccination misinformation and panicked rumours about child abductors that have even led to fatal lynching in some parts of India. WhatsApp's previous attempts to contain fake news included steps like limiting the number of times a message can be forwarded to five and a visual indicator to indicate that it has been forwarded. However, limits on the forwards slows the spread of fake news but doesn’t curtail it and if media reports are to be believed there are software tools for as cheap as Rs 1,000 that let you bypass WhatsApp’s forward restrictions.

So what can WhatsApp do? The underlying solution lies in the form of a mix of AI and NLP. NLP or Natural Language Processing can help identify the text that the user has shared in his/her message and  AI or Artificial Intelligence can be used to match it to an offline database of fake news to infer if a particular shared message is fake or not. For images, auto text extraction from images and for videos, frame by frame analysis and speech to text will have to be used. As I understand, using 'CheckPoint Tipline' that was initiated by WhatsApp in April 2019 and discontinued later in the year, the company has already crowdsourced (collected) enough data about fake news and probably has the offline database (technically a model in AI) ready.

With an AI model in place, WhatsApp can thus provide automatic checking of all messages before it reaches you and notify a user that received message is fake. User can also be provided an option to report a suspicious message as fake which behind the scene sends a message to WhatsApp for verification and let them add it to their database post verification.

In my suggestion, I emphasize notifying a user instead of auto-removal for two reasons -

• Results from a study show that participants who were exposed to a correction of any kind were significantly less likely to believe the false information posted by the first user, relative to those who do not receive a correction. 
• Users should be given the power to know and understand which messages were fake and at the same time provide them an opportunity to refute the WhatsApp claim.

There are quite a few challenges in this approach, the biggest of which pertains to the fact that messages between the sender and receiver are encrypted and even WhatsApp cannot see the content of the messages. This calls for change in encryption policy and while fake messages can be filtered, it opens up WhatsApp to government agencies who might want to sniff on your messages. Also, any learned AI model would have to be constantly adapted to the new strategies and techniques of disinformation. Further, the model will have to be sufficiently trained over a wide range of languages as messages on WhatsApp are shared across various languages.

How can businesses make best use of Facebook's upcoming products and features?

Facebook’s annual F8 conference provided an opportunity to hear the grand plans that Facebook has to achieve its mission of “Giving everyone the power to share anything with anyone” with innovative technology, newer product features and ways to monetize from existing ecosystem. Among other things, Facebook’s uber plan includes satellites, solar planes and drones to have everyone on internet as well. The overall aim is obviously to reach out to more and more people on Earth and have the existing ones spend more and more time on Facebook.

The announcements are all overall the web; below is my take on how businesses, small and large, can make most out of these features –

1. Opening FB Messenger APIs so that developers can create their own chat bots -> The 900 million users strong Facebook Messenger will now have open APIs that businesses can use to write their own implementation. At a high level, businesses will be able to interpret what user typed in and then accordingly respond back including showing specific text, images and videos. For a business, this allows to have the entire e-commerce run through bots. Instead of having a separate app, businesses can use Messenger to send customized details to its customers. As Mark showed in his keynote, a flower company could send a catalog of all flower bouquets to a customer along with prices, photos and delivery time via Messenger. The user could then decide and type his selection in the bot. Knowing the user beforehand, the company could automatically debit his card and deliver to his previously saved address. For a blog, news or related company, asTechCrunch integration shows, one can selectively send top news, customized news, trending news to a user. With some NLP techniques at business’s end, one can use Messenger to become a generic help hub and/or a full-fledged service provider.
2. The new Surround360 camera and open camera APIs -> Facebook launched 360 videos last September and at F8 announced a new camera (with 17 evenly spaced lenses) that allows making it easier to shoot and stitch a 360 video. With these videos offering a kind of full-fledged reality, businesses can display their product more creatively. So, Incredible India could show forts in Delhi with a 360 degree view, Mercedes could similarly show in and out of their new model and an airline could show their business class experience (see Lufthansa’s in-flight experience in this 360 video).
3. Live feed and video API -> These APIs let developers broadcast directly to Facebook from any device, not just smartphones. The devices could be high-powered TV cameras or drones. Businesses can use this to showcase live their product launches, cricket matches, award functions (Grammy or Oscars) or in India to beam marriage functions. Ads can be thrown in around these videos for monetization.
4. Instant Articles and related APIs -> These would allow businesses especially publishers to write content freely and stop worrying about how to optimize it for mobile and slow speed networks. This opens up a new channel for publishers to have their content reaching out to readers. The same can be monetized by ads thrown in, probably similar to how Google Ad works with blogs.
5. ‘Save to Facebook’ button on web -> This would allow businesses to add a button to their standard article templates, and whenever a user taps the button, it will save the article or video directly to user’s Facebook queue. This is similar to what Pocket does on browser and thus has its benefits. I see this as a more of necessity for web pages than a choice.
6. Sharing tool for text-> App developers can now add a quote-sharing tool to their apps. As shown in keynote, Amazon is using it in its next Kindle app. Instead of copying and pasting text from Kindle into Facebook, you can simply highlight it and share it to Facebook. Like previous one, this is more of a necessity. But it also provides an opportunity to get more users through FB sharing.
7. Account Kit -> this allows users to sign in with their phone number or email address without the need for a password or even a Facebook account. As Mark pointed out in his keynote, Saavn, music streaming app, saw over half a million registered phone number users and a 33% increase in daily new registrants within the first two months after integrating Account Kit phone number login. Similar success can be seen with other businesses.

(Originally published in LinkedIn- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-can-businesses-make-best-use-facebooks-upcoming-products-singh?trk=hp-feed-article-title-like)