WhatsApp Tipline Service Introduced to Report Fake News

Follow Us

WhatsApp launched a service in India where over 200 million users in the country can tip off fake news, misinformation and rumours related to elections. Launched by PROTO, a media skilling start-up, the tipline will help create a database of rumours to study misinformation during elections for Checkpoint -- a research project commissioned by WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned company, said in a statement. People in India can submit misinformation or rumours to the "Checkpoint Tipline on WhatsApp" at +91-9643-000-888.




Dig Deeper Media and Meedan, who have previously worked on misinformation-related projects around the world, are helping PROTO to develop the verification and research frameworks for India. "The goal of this project is to study the misinformation phenomenon at scale -- natively in WhatsApp," said PROTO's founders Ritvvij Parrikh and Nasr ul Hadi.

When a WhatsApp user shares a suspicious message with the tipline, PROTO's verification centre will seek to respond and inform the user if the claim made in the message shared is verified or not.

The response will indicate if the information is classified as true, false, misleading, disputed or out of scope and include any other related information that is available. "The centre can review rumours in the form of pictures, video links or text and will cover four regional languages including Hindi, Telugu, Bengali and Malayalam, other than English," said WhatsApp.

Following the project, PROTO aims to submit learnings to the International Center for Journalists to help other organisations learn from the design and operations of this project.

"The research from this initiative will help create a global benchmark for those wishing to tackle misinformation in their own markets," said Fergus Bell, Founder and CEO, Dig Deeper Media.

Recent Comments

Anonymous :

In line with Airtel's ?49 plan that offers 20GB of data for the same duration.

Jio Brings New Rs 49 Plan

Faraz :

Yes.. Corruption and arrogance is in the core of this organisation since beginning.. & Now even gov wants everything to…

BSNL's Operating Profits Signal a Positve Future

Mrs Mithilesh :

BSNL DoT aur ITS ka gulam hai, BSNL ke executives aur staff ki halat gulamo aur kutto se bhi battar…

BSNL's Operating Profits Signal a Positve Future

TheAndroidFreak :

Till BSNL doesn't make 5Mhz of band 1/28/8 live across country, it doesn't make sense. Vi is far better operator…

Vodafone Idea Tests Vi AirFiber with Multiple Partners

Faraz :

In my experience. Airtel 4G went down to 20-30 Mbps where it used to 50-70 Mbps on b3+b40 CA. Jio…

5G Users Consuming 3.6 Times More Data than 4G Users…

Load More
Subscribe
Notify of
0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments