August 31, 2023

On 31 August, 2022, Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority issued a conditional warning to an administrator for the Truth Warriors website under the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act for publishing false claims about COVID-19 vaccines. While online misinformation is a longstanding threat, the nature of engagement on mobile messaging applications, such as WhatsApp, warrants special focus. WhatsApp users often form private groups comprised of trusted members, and these groups are particularly susceptible to the spread of misinformation.

In ‘Encountering and Correcting Misinformation on WhatsApp: The Roles of User Motivations and Trust in Messaging Group Members’ (in Disinformation in the Global South, 2022), Assistant Professor Ozan Kuru (NUS Communications and New Media), Professor Scott W. Campbell (University of Michigan), Assistant Professor Joseph B. Bayer (The Ohio State University), Lemi Baruh (Koç University) and Professor Richard Ling (Nanyang Technological University) explain what they found from a multi-national survey examining social and psychological factors that help explain how, and how much, users engage with misinformation on WhatsApp.

The survey shows that people who use WhatsApp for informational purposes (to acquire news information) more often are more aware of the risk of receiving to misinformation on WhatsApp, and such users also report encountering misinformation more frequently. People using WhatsApp for entertainment purposes also have similar level of risk-awareness about misinformation. However, greater informational use of WhatsApp does not increase one’s tendency to correct other group members who spread misinformation in Turkey and Singapore. In contrast, strong trust in one’s WhatsApp messaging group members increases one’s likelihood of correcting other group users across Turkey, Singapore, and the US.

Furthermore, older people are less sensitive to the risk of misinformation in the US. In both Turkey and the US, older people reported a lower frequency of correcting others against misinformation. Turkish females, on the other hand, are more likely to correct others than their Singaporean counterparts. Higher education and higher income are associated with greater awareness of online falsehood.

Overall, the researchers found that people’s motivations for using WhatsApp and their trust in their messaging group members significantly shape their vigilance to online falsehoods. Using WhatsApp for news was associated with greater perception of the risk of falsehoods and reported exposure to misinformation. Yet, trust in WhatsApp group members lowers the perceived risk of misinformation, although it makes one more likely to correct other users. In Turkey and the US, the elderly population also seems to be more vulnerable to being misinformed via WhatsApp.

Read the article here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781119714491.ch7