![]() In that vote, the BJP came to power with a vote swing of more than 26%. That allowed the BJP “to send a specific message to a specific caste group,” he says. Among them were the 2017 elections in the state of Uttar Pradesh, ahead of which he says WhatsApp groups were created along caste lines. But he had already seen the party’s WhatsApp strategy play out in state elections. In April 2018, Singh resigned - unhappy, he says, with the hateful rhetoric that he felt was forming an increasingly important plank of the BJP’s electoral plan for 2019. (He does not accuse the BJP of any illegal activity.) He alleges the party has collected reams of personal data to classify voters and add them to different group chats based on their location, socioeconomic status, age - and in a strategy that could prove explosive, religion and caste too. Shivam Shankar Singh, 25, worked in data analytics for the BJP between Aug. TIME spoke to a former BJP employee who described activity that evokes reminders of that scandal. The challenges faced by WhatsApp are not limited to misinformation, but also the exploitation of personal data for political ends - an issue that gained widespread attention after the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. (A WhatsApp spokesperson told TIME that during testing of the forwarding-limit, the company saw a 25% reduction of forwarded messages being shared.) In addition, WhatsApp added a “forwarded” label to passed-on messages. ![]() In all, at least 30 people were lynched in what came to be dubbed “WhatsApp Killings.” In response, WhatsApp reduced the number of contacts or groups a user could forward a message to from 100 down to five in India, and 20 globally. In one incident in the state of Maharashtra, five people from a nomadic group were killed by a mob after rumors spread on the app about a child-abducting gang being active in the area. That limit was introduced in July, after a spate of violence in early 2018, when rumors about child kidnappers, forwarded from person to person and group to group, fueled mass hysteria mainly in rural towns and villages across the country. “The volunteer is not able to forward a message to 20 people in one go” any more, she says. “There is an army of volunteers whose job is to sit and forward messages,” says Soma Basu, a fellow at the Reuters Institute at Oxford University, who is researching the spread of hate messages on WhatsApp group chats in India. Experts say the Hindu nationalist BJP is fueling this trend, although opposition parties are using the same tactics. ![]() In recognition of that shift, the BJP’s social media chief declared 2019 the year of India’s first “WhatsApp elections.”īut according to researchers, as well as screenshots of group chats from as recently as January seen by TIME, these WhatsApp group chats frequently contain and disseminate false information and hateful rhetoric, much of which comes from forwarded messages. And for most of them, WhatsApp is the social media app of choice - by one count, more than 90% of smartphone users have it installed. But the strategy reflects a fundamental change in Indian society: at the time of the last national polls in 2014, just 21% of Indians owned a smartphone by 2019, that figure is thought to have nearly doubled to 39%. ![]() In reality, the number is likely to be smaller because many people are in multiple group chats, and most chats have fewer than 256 members. With each group containing a maximum of 256 members, that number of group chats could theoretically reach more than 700 million people out of India’s population of 1.3 billion. ![]() Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has drawn up plans to have three WhatsApp groups for each of India’s 927,533 polling booths, according to reports. Ahead of national elections in April and May, India’s political parties are pouring money into creating hundreds of thousands of WhatsApp group chats to spread political messages and memes. ![]()
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