Facebook's WhatsApp Explores Using Google To Fight Misinformation (venturebeat.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: WhatsApp is working on a major new feature to tackle the spread of misinformation on its service. The Facebook-owned chat app is internally testing a new option that would allow a user to quickly verify the legitimacy of images they have received on WhatsApp by checking if those images had ever appeared on the web before. [...] The unnamed feature relies on Google's reverse image search function to let WhatsApp users upload an image and find where it has appeared on the web. This is a clever solution by WhatsApp, which protects all messages and media content on its platform with end-to-end encryption. While hugely beneficial to end users, using encryption also significantly curtails WhatsApp's ability to scan the content of messages and media on its platform. In emerging markets, users are exhibiting a growing appetite for sharing information through images. In places like India, WhatsApp's largest market and where the service is grappling with the spread of false information, the feature could potentially help many users quickly verify facts and get more context about the image they have received.

Comments

Good precedent.

[fenrif]

Whatsapp is a messaging service. I don't want my messaging service telling me what their opinion is on the things I am discussing. Why do you care if people spread "misinformation?" If I want to learn more about something I can search for it myself. I don't need you getting involved. And especially not Facebook of all people. I can't wait untill Zuckerberg and his ilk are expunged from the public discourse entirely. I don't need billionaire multinational corperations telling me what is true or not. I wouldn't trust them to tell me what colour the sky is, let alone give me the "facts" on complex political or cultural matters.

Re: Good precedent.

[Anonymous Coward]

Too late. And what is going on with the links in these articles not working right? Oh well who cares we can find our own sources.

Re:Good precedent.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you care if people spread "misinformation?" If I want to learn more about something I can search for it myself.

Because most people don't do that. Many many people still believe that Obama's birth certificate is fake and he's a Muslim.
And in some cases, this misinformation has deadly consequences - like that pizza parlor child trafficking story.

And then it distorts the debate and prevents us from solving serious problems. While the rest of the western world is doing what they can to combat global warming, we're giving "skeptics" control of the debate and drastically slowing what we - the leader of the World - from doing anything consequential.

And this retarded idea that all side - regardless of the evidence - needs to have fair and equal time and exposure is also destroying or Republic. The Republican party has gone of its rails and its a party that has a platform that's not based on reality.

And some Democrats who are just trying to add some more much needed social safety nets that will increase all of our standards of living, is being called "socialist" - bu themselves. And then, I have to listen to some working class guy who is struggling with his health insurance premiums and supporting his family say, "I'll never vote Democrat because they are socialist!"

If he actually learned what socialist was fro credible sources, he would understand that the term is being used incorrectly and what is being called socialist is propaganda from the insurance and pharmaceutical industry because they are afraid that their price gouging will come to an end.

Re:Good precedent.

[loufoque]

The USA, the leader of the World?
Thanks for the laugh.

Maybe you should focus on basic education in your country before trying to teach others what to do.
Only in the USA are there people who believe that the Earth is flat, that vaccines are harmful or that climate change is not real. And the reason they do is because them because dumb is in the interest of your corporations.

Re:Good precedent.

[Anonymous Coward]

>>Only in the USA are there people who believe that the Earth is flat, that vaccines are harmful or that climate change is not real.

Sadly that's not true. Stupidity is a worldwide phenomenon. Some countries just hide it better.

Re:Good precedent.

[Anonymous Coward]

But all the cool kids bash the USA and white males. It's the latest in acceptable bigotry.

Re:Good precedent.

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook (and Whatsapp) will still be used to spread misinformation and people will still soak it up. The reason is known as "pigeon chess". They want to believe. Dumb people (let's say IQ<100) in particular seek information that "proves" they were wronged, that their situation is a result of someone taking advantage of them. Why? Because they do get taken advantage of quite regularly. They're dumb, and lots of people actually are unscrupulous and always looking for people they can sell bridges to. That link that shows them the infographic they're looking at is bogus? Well, obviously THEY don't want us to know, so they smear the good people who share the truth with us. You can't cure stupid.

Re:Good precedent.

[tsa]

Leader of the World? Who gave you that idea?

Re:Good precedent.

[tsa]

I live in the Netherlands and here it's about the same.

Re:Good precedent.

[tsa]

But then again, a country that calls itself 'civilized' so much that it looks like it is trying to proof something but can't because it's run by a brain-dead carrot is asking for a good bashing.

Re:Good precedent.

[Stan92057]

I am not against vaccination per say but to say they cant kill is a total lie also. Funny i look at pro vaccination sites and they say the number who die is small but never give a number but then turn around and show how many people have died who didn't have vaccinations is very questionable. The correct answer IMO is the number who die is an acceptable LOSS to the pro vaccination people and our government ..tell that to a dead kids parents and then see why they fight against vaccinations. Both side lie. IMO if the government forces people to get vaccinations then they have to pay the parents for their loss..do they? I don't even know but i do know both side lie. and if the pro people vaccinate their kids then what do they need to worry about? they wouldn't get the mumps from a non vaccinated child? right? I don't know im not an expert but i can say i have no faint in either side to tell the full truth and that's the main problem. And the earth is round and climate change is real..

Re:Good precedent.

[AmiMoJo]

"I like being ignorant. I resent anyone trying to make useful information easier for me to find."

"Calorie counts on menus, the green light at a crossing, the safety information on medicine. All this is just nanny corporations trying to brainwash me, and I don't like it."

Worthy of Infowars.

Re: Good precedent.

[Anonymous Coward]

All the immigrants coming in illegally come frome countries that dont do mass vacinations. But...hey who am I to judge. Bash USA! /s

Re: Good precedent.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a demonstrable difference between calorie counts on menus and a chat app intercepting and censoring communications.

You know this of course, but as an arrogant, smug, condescending emotional midget, you try to move the dial towards authoritarian leftism at every juncture.

You are an enemy of humanity.

Re:Good precedent.

[Anonymous Coward]

Modern Flat Earthers started in England - and so did the anti-vax hype. China is also a popular spot for both beliefs, with more people there believing in those theories than there are people in the US, period.

As for climate change, I don't know which country you are from, but even in Western countries, 25% or more don't believe in it - including "climate saints" like Germany or Norway. In Africa, it's about 40%. In Asia, climate change believers don't even break 50%, with only about 45% believing.

As usual, when someone tries to bash the US, they're actually lying and tripping over their own jealous prejudices.

Re: Good precedent.

[Anonymous Coward]

You sure told him, Boris!

Re: Good precedent.

[Anonymous Coward]

Forced-vax nazis are just nazis looking for an excuse to oppress their fellow man.

Re: Good precedent.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which link is not working for you? Everything is working for me.

Re: Good precedent.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, like all those soup kitchen people. Those nazis want to stuff the poor full of soup under the pretense of preventing under-nourishment. It's all a communist plot I tell you!

Anti-vaxers are a bizarro cult.

Re:Good precedent.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are those lines in quotes? fenrif never said anything such thing.

Oh! I know! You are attempting to prove fenrif right by taking WhatsApp's plan to the next level and rewriting what fenrif wrote! That's it, right?

Re:Good precedent.

[Anonymous Coward]

Like a broken fucking record.

Who informs the informers

[Anonymous Coward]

. help many users quickly verify facts and get more context about the ima

So, if they're sent a picture of Donald Trump, they will gettooltip links like "Russian Spy" and "Was 2016 election legitimate?"

Personally, I liked it better when you were expected to use your own brain on the internet.

Re:Who informs the informers

[AmiMoJo]

No, it will say something like "This photo originates from AFP" with a link to their original post. It's then up to you to decide if you trust AFP or Infowars or whatever.

It's a very clever idea because it's not commenting on the accuracy or truthfulness of the image at all, merely telling you where it originates from.

Re: Who informs the informers

[drinkypoo]

And fucking morons like you would disbelieve a truth because of the messenger.

Wolf! Wolf!

Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

The conflict cannot be resolved ..... mongrel Trotsky-slut mis-information is a white yeomans universal law ... outside bitch-slapping Rawlsian DemoRat parasites into the gutter and burning their bones. Who's next ?

The Great Deregulation of Censorship

[tinkerton]

Free speech used to have some protection in public space. Now there's an open market where social platforms are willing to play along with any pressure group with some clout to make their target disappear. And of course also with whatever feelgood project happens to be hip.

Re:The Great Deregulation of Censorship

[tinkerton]

An even though all the proud defenders of corporate freedom are utterly incapable to see it, the largest pressure group is the government. Why the hell is all the publishing of US opponents or even remotely sympathetic to it, so actively suppressed?

Re:The Great Deregulation of Censorship

[AmiMoJo]

How is giving you extra information any kind of censorship?

Are you saying that knowing an image came from 4chan is censorship because it might cause people to doubt its authenticity?

Ignorance is strength, apparently.

Re:The Great Deregulation of Censorship

[serviscope_minor]

Free speech used to have some protection in public space.

Your free speech is NOT infringed if listeners can more easily consult a third party to check if what you're saying is accurate.

Honestly the so-called defenders of free speech here do such a bad job that you're doing it more harm than good.

You have a right to speak. You certainly do not have the right to infringe others free speech so they can't call bullshit on you.

Re: The Great Deregulation of Censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporate Progressive nazis sure do love corporate censorship and misinformation campaigns.

Re:The Great Deregulation of Censorship

[tinkerton]

Actually I think you are right in this specific case. The feature is an image lookup feature. I don't have any real objections to it as it is stated It is not a top down implementation if it does nothing more than helping the user to look things up.

Your 'honestly' part on the other hand...
It is a problem how to respond to the positive initiatives of Google. There is an actual conflict there. My statement was focused on the heart of the matter and it did not criticize this specific initiative. The whole fake news issue is political and the idea of google and facebook helpfully pushing you in the right direction stinks.
If you are going to evaluate the initiatives one by one without looking at the big picture this will have only a minor effect on the overall direction which is that Google becomes an arbitrator of truth(through deranking, demonetizing, labelling, linking). So it needs to be mentioned. There is a subtle distinction between 'everything Google does is bad' and 'the really good things Google does empower it to do more bad things'

A better example is censorship instances. You can't evaluate them one by one (there is a lot of stuff we'd better be off without)becasue then you're supporting the general approach and overall you end up with a massive amount of censorship.

Take a subject I find really annoying: vaccination.If part of the population decide to avoid vaccination this makes the whole of the population vulnerable(according to epidemology models). So I really want people to go in the direction of vaccination. But not by Google and Facebook leaning on them.

Re:The Great Deregulation of Censorship

[tinkerton]

How is giving you extra information any kind of censorship?

You're not even asking the right question. Google in this specific case is just providing a tool here for helping you lookup things. They're not even giving information.
But to answer the stated question. Censorship is so last century. It was the policy for when the library was small and the only way to hide a book was to keep it out of the library. Nowadays the library is large. There still is censorship but there are new methods to complement it. Now you hide a book by deranking it, by removing the references. And if it still remains visible by giving it a bad name so that nobody wants to read it. There is so much other good stuff to read. If your bad name label if very visible then you can make sure that nobody will be seen reading it or will be seen recommending it to others either.
I recall the issue of the PMRC putting labels on records or the Sneetches having to wear stars on thars. (I'm getting old) The visibility of the label causes multiple orders of avoidance.

Re:The Great Deregulation of Censorship

[AmiMoJo]

Problem with this argument is that you can't give equal ranking to every crackpot. There is only one top spot, there is only one first page of results. When people search for NASA videos they probably don't want stuff about the moon landings being fake and the earth flat either, so to provide a good service that stuff has to be "de-ranked" for searches about NASA.

On the other hand you have guys like Tarrant getting sucked into these conspiracy theories. The argument is that we should just debunk them and that will fix the problem, but when you look at something like Lauren Southern's "Great Replacement" video (cited by Tarrant in his manifesto) when debunkings are linked it just results in them getting hammered with dislikes and de-ranked.

In other words the concept of using ranking to preserve free speech or to combat extremism is flawed. It's the wrong tool.

Unfortunately even adding sources doesn't work - in fact it seems to have the opposite effect. To pick up Lauren Southern's video again, her own listed sources debunk her own video. But her audience doesn't check the links, they just see them there and think they add credibility, like it's some kind of well researched academic essay instead of a bizarre anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

I don't know what the solution is.

Re:The Great Deregulation of Censorship

[tinkerton]

We can't do without rankings anymore but not all types of rankings are the same. A community ranking like a product appraisal or a karma score can suffer from all the groupthink there is but it is relatively flat and there can be multiple competing rankings. It often works well. But with rankings now being outsourced to 'experts' everyone with clout knows they have to get their people in there. So you get the Atlantic Council or the (meanwhle demised) Weekly Standard to control the rankings now.

Re:The Great Deregulation of Censorship

[AmiMoJo]

Community rankings are too easy to game. Slashdot gets it all the time, Reddit is group-think central, everything else is gamed relentlessly. Any attempt to fix the spamming is decried as censorship and Big Brother telling us what to think.

In any case, it doesn't fix the problem. How are you going to stop people getting radicalized by people like Southern and Sargon? Just recommending a debunking video as the next in line doesn't seem to work.

Re:The Great Deregulation of Censorship

[tinkerton]

Who says we should fix the problem? I want there to be a way for people to improve their understanding if they want to, and I want to avoid things getting out of hand.
And that means there is a need for trust. No debunking video will help when there is no degree of trust. If you have whole groups of people who distrust the system there are no rational arguments to change that , but there is an approach, and that is starting to work to earn their trust again. Because there are real reasons for the distrust. It's a social problem.

And since the mainstream media want to play a leading role in informing us, I've seen mainstream media change. They are less reliable than ever (in reality it's still a mixed bag but there is a severe deterioration in comparison with a generation ago) . The media are one of the bad players in this. They are losing control over the narrative and want it back. But part of the reason they are losing control is because they don't deserve to be trusted. So you get a groupthink where they all trust each other. That is why Trump's election came out of the blue. There was no understanding of the deep distrust towards the ruling powers.

Re:The Great Deregulation of Censorship

[tinkerton]

Also I don't have a clue what Southern and Sargon are.

Re:The Great Deregulation of Censorship

[AmiMoJo]

Who says we should fix the problem?

People who don't want to be murdered by extremists.

So you get a groupthink where they all trust each other.

Not really, they are constantly attacking each other in fact.

Re:The Great Deregulation of Censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

Who says we should fix the problem?

People who don't want to be murdered by extremists.

Trumpsters aren't asking for this though. They're asking for things like walls and Muslim travel bans. Some might still believe in Trump's rhetoric about going after terrorists' families. Basically, "people who don't want to be murdered by extremists" focus more on physically going after extremists than controlling their speech online (which makes sense seeing as Trumpsters are not above spewing crap online themselves)

Freeze Peach

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not the government so it is not censorship.

Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.

Just go build your own platform.

Re:Freeze Peach

[umghhh]

Och build your own platform is good. Public space is a lawfully recognized term. It used to be applied to places where humans physically congregated - Speakers' corner is a version of that dedicated to making political speeches. Whatsapp is a huge platform - is there any other with similar reach? SImilarily twitter and FB. Some authorities all over the world use these platforms too to communicate with citizens. It is a public space and as soon as it is recognized as such it should behave like one. The speech there should be allowed as long as the law is not broken. Once we cleared that let us move to censorship - you claim that free speech limiting activities are only called censorship when done by government? Possibly only by Republic (if in US) as Democratic one would not limit speech. Without good reason it would not, that is.
Your claims come close to be hypocritical or uninformed.

And don't forget:

[Anonymous Coward]

The one "internet giant" (==overvalued webshit co.) using another "internet giant" (==web advert co.) to be their arbiter of their truth.

I could solve the problem in 90 days

[MikeRT]

Instead of censoring the misinformation, I'd just order the security services to stack the bodies until the stench reaches the ISS if that's what it takes to make the rioters get the clue that "we don't tolerate that shit here."

Re:I could solve the problem in 90 days

[Anonymous Coward]

Riot ... which ... ones ... a viperous nest of Rawlsian-agitprop spewing gaffotized Trotsky-slut parasites .... or well-maintained white supremes complete with lathes, parchment and Oscilloscopes ?

Re: I could solve the problem in 90 days

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone please alert Ivan's supervisor? He *really* needs to attend more ESL classes before you let him resume trolling.

Hillary has a 90% chance to become president

[Anonymous Coward]

With gems like this why wouldn't we want large multinational corporations telling us what to think:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll/clinton-has-90-percent-chance-of-winning-reuters-ipsos-states-of-the-nation-idUSKBN1322J1

Many democrats are actually socialists. Hell - they even have an organization with the name:

https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/what-is-democratic-socialism/

There are many many articles from "credible" news organizations questioning the methodology of many climate change claims. Here's one from Forbes magazine:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/07/17/that-scientific-global-warming-consensus-not/#274dd72b3bb3

Does the ministry of truth consider Forbes to be unreliable news - we aren't talking Newsmax here.

The point of all this is that no one gets to determine what I read and what I think. The fact that Google and Facebook think they should be the arbiters of truth is all the evidence I need to know that they shouldn't be.

So much for Whatsapp messages being encrypted

[bagofbeans]

Encryption and privacy is not exactly ensured by the two largest hoarders of PI sharing message content, is it?

Re:So much for Whatsapp messages being encrypted

[Anonymous Coward]

What else do you expect from two companies run by Jews?

Won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry but the uneducated and/or stupid people will believe anything.
They even believe that an old man in the sky created the universe.

Make Facebook Legally accountable!

[bussdriver]

Facebook's GOAL is to replace the web for most everything. It's an actual stated goal!

Why are not more people seeing Facebook as the new AOL Online? We even have advertising saying "find us with AOL keyword ------" that is, find us on Facebook; sometimes leaving out the URL just like back then. The major difference being AOL didn't have personal blog pages; which they surely would have if they hadn't decided to be an ISP instead of trying to recreate the www.

You can't control the internet and the web is not so easy either. but when you create a centralized service you have 1 point of weakness and control. You couldn't control this stuff on the web or track as well. it takes big centralized gatekeepers to do that.

To protect freedom you need to make AOL Online type places unable to work by imposing all the crazy restrictions people want to be P.C. all at once. It's impossible and that is exactly the point. They don't need a business; we had all the elements before and will have later but they are small separated bits with no central authority. Do not confuse new AOL with the rest web. It's running on the internet but it's as out of touch and as bad as AOL was (worse.)

The next gen applications of RSS can replace facebooks. we just need a peer discovery service protocol. blog services exist. they have similar UI to them all now. one just needs the friend feed crap and a way to migrate that info. It doesn't have to be complex but naturally it'll be more steps than facebook.... (maybe people who can't handle that are so vapid and/or stupid they shouldn't be publishing.)

Re:Make Facebook Legally accountable!

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Because Facebook is engineered to be very addictive.
2. Because a lot of people, and activity, are on Facebook, and going off Facebook means giving up on those interactions, and being perceived as a recluse, or as being condescending.

The irony...

[Anonymous Coward]

... of an app founded in privacy, now owned by Facebook and implementing features that send your data to Google.

A service belongs to the user

[AHuxley]

the service should pass on a message.
Not take time to question the politics of the message.

Of course, "Misinformation" means...

[Anonymous Coward]

...anything we disagree with politically, or anything that makes people question The Current Truth, or anything that offends one of the Special Groups.

Next: Fact check on CNN

[Anonymous Coward]

Because apparently those are the only reliable source of information...