Can WhatsApp stop spreading misinformation without compromising encryption?

On a jaunt through the darker corners of the internet, a conspiracy-minded reader might come across a fake news story claiming that 5G cell towers spread Covid-19. Alarmed, he sends the story to his family WhatsApp group. A cousin forwards it to a few of her friends, and one of them forwards it to a group of 200 people dedicated to sharing local news. As the lie gains traction, WhatsApp helps it reach more people more quickly—but the app’s managers have no way of knowing.WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging platform used by 2 billion people largely in the global south, has become a particularly troublesome vector for misinformation. The core of the problem is its use of end-to-end encryption, a security measure that garbles users’ messages while they travel from one phone to another so that no one other than the sender and the recipient can read them.Encryption is a crucial privacy protection, but it also prevents WhatsApp from going as far as many of its peers to moderate misinformation. The app has taken some steps to limit the spread of viral messages, but some researchers and fact-checkers argue it should do more, while privacy purists worry the solutions will compromise…
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