Fears about the spread of disinformation on encrypted chat apps could be addressed by a system that can expose fake news without infringing on people’s privacy, its creators claim.
WhatsApp and other end-to-end encrypted messaging apps have struggled to stop the flow of disinformation on their platforms. In 2019, WhatsApp introduced limits on the number of times a message can be forwarded in an attempt to slow the spread of fake news. However, because the messages are encrypted, there is no way for them to be reviewed by fact checkers as happens on more public-facing forms of social media such as Twitter and Facebook.
at George Washington University in Washington DC and his colleagues say their Fuzzy Anonymous Complaint Tally System (FACTS) would allow users to report a message without revealing its contents. The sender, and the information within, would only be revealed to a third party if the number of complaints about a single message crossed a particular threshold.
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“We really tried to avoid saying what should be the tipping point,” says Theriault. “Our whole goal was to say: ‘Here’s this model anyone could use’, and [apps] can determine the threshold.”
One potential weakness, common to reporting systems across social media, is that malicious users could falsely flag messages as disinformation in an attempt to get them removed. To avoid this, FACTS would log complaints about messages – but not the contents of the still-encrypted messages – and automatically decide if they match previous reports in order to prevent a user from reporting messages multiple times. The system also caps the number of messages a single user can report in a given time frame.
“It has the advantage that it is a scoring of complaints and doesn’t involve requiring access to message content per se,” says at the University of Surrey, UK.
However, Woodward can foresee issues with the system if users were to appeal against a complaint. “Can you ban a user without them appealing based on the actual content?” he asks. Woodward believes that such methods are necessary now as fake news becomes a bigger issue. “We at least need a debate about how it might be reported whilst maintaining privacy,” he says.
WhatsApp declined to comment on this story when approached by New Scientist.
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