The hoaxes are usually transmitted easily from person to person, or within groups. Messaging applications such as WhatsApp are the ideal place to share false or dubious content, since it takes advantage of trust with close people or addiction to WhatsApp where we always read the messages that come to us. Therefore, even WhatsApp itself has had to introduce methods to prevent their spread , and we are going to explain how to use them, as well as what other tools we have to check them.
Before 2020, WhatsApp was already quite concerned about hoaxes. The biggest problems arose in India, where there were hoaxes that resulted in the death of dozens of people by mobs of people, and by crimes they had not committed. Therefore, they introduced a limit to forward messages, where a message could not be forwarded more than five times.
WhatsApp measures to stop hoaxes
However, in 2020 that was not enough, since a person could send all those messages without limits to all the chats they wanted. Thus, a hoax propagator could send a message to hundreds of people, and thus start a chain. In addition, it is possible to bypass the limit simply by clicking “copy” and pasting it in a chat.
Therefore, in 2020 they announced that they were going to introduce a new limit, where it was only going to be possible to forward a message to a chat. There were several hoaxes in this regard with this measure, where it was said that it had been the Government of Spain that had worked with WhatsApp to introduce this limitation as one of the reasons for not using WhatsApp, and they were encouraged to switch to Telegram, but nothing more far from reality, this measure was introduced worldwide.
Along with it, WhatsApp will also introduce a small icon of a magnifying glass to be able to search for forwarded messages directly on Google, in such a way that many text messages or links could be entered in the search engine to see if they are fake messages. For now, the only option is to copy them and find them by hand to sort between recent publications.
Always doubt forwarded messages
René Descartes was the one who established the principle of methodical doubt as a tool to doubt everything that exists and try to reach at least one absolute truth. That path of doubt led him to enunciate the principle of “I think, therefore I am.” The skepticism against everything that comes to us by WhatsApp is a great help to keep our word, or even worse, sharing a certainty whose content we are not sure.
Although there are times when reality surpasses fiction, in most cases hoaxes, depending on the format, tend to stand out for several elements. For example, in forwarded text , there are often spelling mistakes as the first element. Secondly, phrases such as “you will not see it in the media”, the use of words such as “Confirmed”, “forward this message so that it is known”, or similar, are always used to try to make the person reading it believe that Are true. If information is truthful in itself, it does not need these additions.
In the case of videos , on many occasions their low resolution prevents knowing if, for example, an event is occurring in Spain, or if the identity of the person who appears in it coincides with that stated in a text message associated with a video. It is easy to find the content of the video in the media, and there they are usually associated with a denial, or even better if it is what you are looking for: something that confirms that it is real.
In the case of images , the situation is even worse, since all kinds of elements can be retouched, such as the creation of false tweets. In these cases, it is usually best to search for the tweets by Google, and if they do not appear, it can usually be because they are either false, or because their author has deleted them. If we search for the text on Google or on networks like Twitter, we can check if there is any denial about them.
Finally, we can also receive links from all types of media. There are websites where a user can create their own fake news, such as 12 minutes. And unfortunately, even in traditional media some false news or news that does not conform to reality usually sneaks in, but in most cases there are usually denials from the media itself, from other media, or even from the person affected by said hoax, which usually have a specific purpose for the most part. For this reason, even if a news item appears in a reliable medium, it may be false or misrepresented, and looking for example responses in comments on networks such as Twitter or looking for the news in other media can help us avoid buying a hoax.
WhatsApp itself has an official FAQ in which they give a series of tips to avoid hoaxes, among which are the ones we have mentioned, how to identify forwarded messages, be careful with fake photos and videos, keep out our prejudices against information that confirm our established beliefs, prevent false content from becoming real by repeating it, or corroborate sources.
Use hoax checkers or see for yourself
Fortunately, there are a multitude of hoax checkers today. Among them we find Maldita , formerly Maldito Bulo , who together with Newtral, AFP and EFE , is part of the IFCN network , which stands for International Fact-Checking Network . This network, used by Facebook in all its apps and social networks, unites media from around the world that have passed a series of controls by Facebook to verify false news.
In the case of Facebook, the social network assigns a poster to a false news item that alerts the user that the content they are viewing is false. In WhatsApp, as the application does not know the content of the messages that the user sends because they are end-to-end encrypted, the use of these means is optional. And thanks to that list, all countries know where to go to identify hoaxes .
The denial of hoaxes is something that usually takes a couple of days, where unfortunately much of the damage can be done. Therefore, until a hoax is denied , it is important to corroborate the information with as many sources as possible. No one is free to promote a hoax or false information for any purpose such as political, ideological or personal gain, and although it is sometimes difficult to verify that something is true, we must do everything possible to try
