Censorship is not the answer

Derek Roga, CEO of EQUIIS Technologies, considers the implications of WhatsApp’s decision to limit the number of times its users can forward messages in the app.

This week, in a controversial move, WhatsApp revealed that it is now limiting all of its members to only being able to forward any single message up to five times on the platform, in an effort to tackle the spread of false information. The Facebook-owned business had already introduced the policy to India six months ago and is now rolling it out globally. Until now, users elsewhere had the ability to forward messages up to 20 times at once. But is this type of censorship sustainable in the long term for an app whose mantra was once to support the freedom of its users’ speech?

Previous calls for more regulation and censorship of social media and technology companies have more often than not been politically motivated. When online, who gets to say what is based on the judgment of unelected corporations; what you say and see is dependent on judgments made by those monitoring social media platforms, and ultimately their own moral compass. As part of the Facebook powerhouse, WhatsApp holds immense power over public discourse and when a decision is made that content isn’t fit for public consumption, it can disappear forever.

Misinformation
While fake stories and deceitful groups have been a major focus, misinformation on WhatsApp has become a problem elsewhere in the world. It became a particularly big issue ahead of the United States presidential elections in November, which was when misleading voting information, conspiracy theories, and false stories about candidates spread across the network. However, fighting misinformation on WhatsApp uncovers an array of other issues to do with surveillance, encryption, and privacy, as it opens up the moderators’ ability to be able to see what’s being conversed and decide on whether to intervene.

We recently launched our new global messaging app, flaim, which assures users that they will have 100 per cent encrypted security every time they use the platform. This means that it won’t matter where users are in the world, or which network they’re on, as their communications are never monitored or intercepted. We are investing heavily on content moderation to ensure that harmful content is deleted as quickly as possible. In fact, this will be one of our most significant initiatives moving forward – and rightly so. In addition, the community will be rewarded for self-moderation and we will be using several technological solutions that provide an automated filtering function. In this context and within these parameters, issues like propagating unethical political interference will be extremely difficult.

The death of privacy is fast becoming a more widely-discussed topic; where technology has been introduced, so have several factors that result in our personal lives being viewed through a microscope of data that formulates around our usage of the tech we’re given. Users, because of the data that they hold, are effectively becoming a by-product of their own technology, and in particular, the technology services that they use for free.

Personal data

As with any free service online, there’s always a catch, and the cost that is paid by the user is ultimately their privacy and their personal data. Of course, to avoid personal data from being taken, users can still survey the internet without being censored. Ironically, censorship with surveillance is better than censorship on its own. This has been proven many a time in regimes around the world where censorship is what pushes users to start using different ways to browse online. For example, anonymity platforms such as TOR and the Onion Router, start to look attractive, and bypass censor walls. Albeit, without censorship and surveillance as TOR has revealed, awful things can occur beyond internet policing.

Although I personally believe that WhatsApp’s monitoring of user messaging and restriction of sharing should never have been an option to begin with, it’s obvious that the occurrence of political or violent motives being shared illegally on these platforms should be stopped. In terms of whether this is sustainable in the long-term, it is yet to be seen, but if the rise of technology has proven anything to us, it is that despite how secure social networking may claim to be, someone will always find a way to get their point across – whether censored or surveyed at all.

In conclusion, regulating speech like this is not a scalable, or consistent solution to the problem at hand. It may be hard to fathom, but there will always be someone, somewhere, who can find a gap in the infrastructure and defeat the objective of regulating speech. Going forward, we’re likely to see platform companies like WhatsApp or flaim or any of the other multitudes of players within the social media economy trying harder to find solutions, but unfortunately their critics will also likely get louder.