WhatsApp on Wednesday partnered with a New Delhi-based non-profit Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) to spread awareness and education in its users about the serious need to verify any kind of information received through its platform. The move comes just weeks after the central government directed the company to come up with solutions to stop the spread of disinformation on its platform.
“Our goal is to help keep people safe by creating greater awareness about fake news and empowering users to help limit its spread,” Ben Supple, Public Policy Manager at WhatsApp, said in a statement.
During a meeting held between WhatsApp CEO and Union IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on August 21, WhatsApp was directed to comply with the law of the land and initiate “suitable” steps to prevent the messaging platform’s misuse.
The meeting between the two took place in the backdrop of several lynching incidents in India where the reason was cited to be the misinformation being spread through the instant messaging platform which has got more than 200 million active users currently in India alone.
Under the new partnership bond with WhatsApp, DEF has committed itself to hold about 40 training sessions for community leaders of 10 states of the country where there were cases reported about worrisome violence and also the upcoming polls to be held in the end of this year.
DEF also said that would provide education to government officials, civil society organizations, administration representatives, students etc. to spread awareness regarding the challenge.
The main theme of the training will be to enable WhatsApp users to understand the difference between opinions and facts and to encourage and inculcate a habit of verifying information by doing some simple checks before forwarding any kind of data to their friends and family.
Additionally, the organization, DEF, will incorporate this new training to make it a part of their network of more than 30,000 members in seven states.
“We at WhatsApp and DEF hope these training workshops will help build an empathetic and conscious community of WhatsApp users who learn to respond rather than react to every message they receive,” said Osama Manzar, Founder-Director of DEF.
WhatsApp has already initiated several technological measures to stop the problem of disinformation which includes the recent introduction of the “forwarded” tag and limiting forwarding to five chats at once.
“In addition to the steps we are taking within WhatsApp, we believe impacting lives through the power of education is critical to helping achieve the vision of a ‘Digital India’,” Supple added.
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