WhatsApp Agrees to Comply with Indian Law

Social communication application WhatsApp had promised Indian government that it would soon develop tools that would combat fake messages and also help investigator in locating and finding people who are spreading fake information and rumors through mass message forwards on social media.

In a meeting with Union Information and Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, Facebook-owned WhatsApp chief executive officer Chris Daniels has given this assurance in New Delhi recently.

WhatsApp is asked to work out and find out solutions to locate the origin of sinister messages, which led to a series of mob lynching incidents this year across the country. After the meeting Minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad said, “It does not need rocket science to locate a message”.

He also said that the U.S. tech giant had agreed to appoint a grievance officer to deal with the issues in India, “The company (WhatsApp) needs to find solutions to deal with sinister developments like mob-lynching and revenge porn and has to follow Indian law”. 

With more than 200 million users, India is the biggest market for WhatsApp and in India, people forward more messages, photographs, and videos than in any other country in the world. 

The government is also concerned about the run-up to the National Elections scheduled in 2019, where the supporters of political parties could use social media platforms such as WhatsApp to spread false messages.

A month ago in July, WhatsApp had declared that the message forwards will be limited to five chats at a time, either among individuals or groups and has promised, it would remove the quick forward button. 

Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad also informed that WhatsApp is working with the law enforcement agencies in India to tackle the problem and planning a big campaign to educate consumers about fake messages. 

Chris Daniels, who took over as the chief executive officer (CEO) of WhatsApp in May, has told the government it would work out a technological solution to trace the origin of fake messages. The Facebook-owned firm, American messaging platform has also promised to comply with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) rules relating to local storage of financial data by having servers in India. All this happened after the government took threatening action against the messaging platform over the spread of fake news.

Daniels, who has earlier experience of running internet.org at the California-based social media firm, has been dealing with the Indian authorities over the issue of fake news, soon after he was appointed as the CEO of WhatsApp.