WhatsApp says it is deleting 2m accounts per month as part of an effort to blunt the use of the world’s most popular messaging app to spread fake news and misinformation.
The Facebook-owned service published the data as part of a white paper on “stopping abuse” that was launched on Wednesday in India, the biggest market for the company with more than 200m users.
Corin Imai, Senior Security Advisor at DomainTools:
“While this is of course a welcome response to fake news by WhatsApp, stopping the spread of fake news which is already in circulation can only do so much, particularly across just one platform. In order to combat fake news at the source, governments need to deploy threat intelligence programmes, which can trace the articles back to specific domains and registrars in order to blacklist them. Fake news harms political discourse and is often disseminated by hostile nation-states for this purpose, and stopping it should be a top priority for media organisations, governments and social media platforms.”
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