Whatsapp Tipline for Indians to Report Fake News During Elections

Whatsapp Tipline for Indians to Report Fake News During Elections by Whatsap

On Tuesday, WhatsApp launched a "Tipline" service in India to report the fake news during elections.

The Facebook-owned WhatsApp said in a statement, "Launched by PROTO, a media skilling start-up, the tipline will help create a database of rumours to study misinformation during elections for Checkpoint - a research project commissioned by WhatsApp".

People in India can submit misinformation or rumours to the "Checkpoint Tipline on WhatsApp" at +91 9643-000-888.

"The goal of this project is to study the misinformation phenomenon at scale - natively in WhatsApp", said PROTO's founders Ritvvij Parrikh and Nasr ul Hadi.

Dig Deeper Media and Meedan have previously worked on misinformation-related projects around the world. They are helping PROTO to develop the verification and research frameworks for India.

Fergus Bell, Founder and CEO of Dig Deeper Media said,  "The research from this initiative will help create a global benchmark for those wishing to tackle misinformation in their own markets".

When a WhatsApp user shares a suspicious message with the tipline. The PROTO's verification centre will seek to respond and inform the user if the claim made in the message shared is verified or not. The response will indicate if information is classified as true, false, misleading, disputed or out of scope and include any other related information that is available.

Whatsapp said, "The centre can review rumours in the form of pictures, video links or text and will cover four regional languages including Hindi, Telugu, Bengali and Malayalam, other than English".