Fact-Checking Misinformation on WhatsApp in Indonesia

The next speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Detta Rahmawan, whose interest is in the transmission of misinformation via WhatsApp in Indonesia. This platform is very popular in Indonesia, also because of its privacy and encryption features. But this also enables the spread of hoax content on the platform.

Fact-checkers have paid increasing attention to this; in Indonesia, MAFINDO is a pioneer in fact-checking activities. But there are still few studies of WhatsApp hoaxes and their debunking – there is indecision about what hoaxes on WhatsApp are worthy of fact-checks, especially also as a result of the limited resources of fact-checking organisations.

This project used a qualitative content analysis of MAFINDO fact-checks across all platforms in order to identify WhatsApp hoaxes; of some 3,600 fact-checks only some 441 addressed WhatsApp hoaxes. These focussed mainly on politics, COVID-19, health, religion, and crime, but ‘other’ was actually the largest category: hoaxes also circulated mainly in text-only forms. Because of WhatsApp’s limitations, it is also unclear what the origins of such hoaxes were – they did not necessarily originate from news articles.

Such hoaxes were fact-checked mainly because of their magnitude and relevance; some 65% addressed public priorities, justifying their checking. MAFINDO mainly relies on news articles for such fact-checking, but for WhatsApp hoaxes this is problematic because of the nature of the hoaxes that circulate here.