New Delhi: Further increasing its efforts to contain the spread of fake news, WhatsApp said today that it is on a mission to expand its radio campaign to 10 more states which include Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, and Maharashtra.

After facing severe government criticism over the circulation of fake on its platform in the backdrop of mob lynching incidents across the country, the Facebook-owned company has been on a mission to spread awareness.

The first such radio campaign was started by WhatsApp on August 29 in seven states of India which included Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Rajasthan. The campaign urges users to check the correctness of the information received through its platform before forwarding or sharing it with others.

“The second phase of the campaign starts on September 5 with radio ads across 83 radio stations of AIR across the states of Assam, Tripura, West Bengal, Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana, Orissa and Tamil Nadu,” WhatsApp said in a statement.

The company is running all these campaigns in eight regional languages and they are Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Oriya, Assamese, Bengali, Tamil and will go on for a total of 15-day duration, it added.

“The campaign has been designed in an easy-to-understand format to help users spot misinformation and further sensitize them about the challenges of fake news and addressing these as a society,” it noted.

The campaigns ask users to first verify the truthness, correctness, and authenticity of these messages before forwarding it to anyone and they also have the option to report such content which they find as inflammatory. It also suggests users take utmost care before forwarding any kind of messages that may contain misinformation and said that such wrong moves could have serious consequences.

WhatsApp has received two notices until now to contain the spread of fake news over its platform and this resulted in the company taking serious steps in this regard which included restricting the total number of forwards and added ‘forwarded’ label to help users in identifying such kind of messages. The company is also in the process of establishing a local corporate entity.

However, it has, not accepted the demand by the government to come out with a solution with which messages can be traced back. The reason cited by the company is that the creation of such a software will go against the very idea of user privacy and end-to-end encryption.

The government of India is taking strict stance over the use of social media across platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter due to the spread of misinformation.

The government warned the company that it will start treating the messaging platform as an abettor in rumor spreading and as a result, it will have to follow legal procedure if it does not take steps in this regard.

“WhatsApp stands committed in its efforts to address these issues jointly with civil society, stakeholders and the government,” the company said in its statement.

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