-Five friends were visiting relatives
in a South Indian countryside village.
It was July 13, 2018.
It was set to be an idyllic vacation
until villagers started deflating the tires
of the group's car.
Videos of the men had been forwarded
to a WhatsApp group in the nearby town of Murki.
The viral messages falsely accused them
of being child kidnappers.
Violence erupted.
An angry mob beat the innocent men.
They were badly injured and one of them was killed.
All because false information spread via WhatsApp.
Five friends, Salham Al Kubassi, Mohammed Salman,
Mohammed Azam, Mohammed Afroz, and Noor Mohammed
went to visit Handikera,
a small village in the southern state of Karnataka
on July 13, 2018.
They ventured to the outskirts of town for a picnic
and drove by some children getting out of school.
We visited this area to find people
who witnessed the events that took place next.
-[The men] had brought chocolates from Qatar.
They were giving them to the children.
The people in the fields saw them, the children.
[They asked] What is happening? What is happening?
These people came in cars.
They are giving chocolates to the children.
-There had been rumors about child kidnappers across India.
Parents were wary.
Some thought the men might be kidnappers.
Several villagers rushed toward their car.
-And some of these angry villagers
started deflating the tires of the vehicle [the men]
were traveling in.
-They were beating, beating, beating them.
And, thinking that they will kill them,[the friends]
began running.
-Salham Al Kubassi, Mohammed Salman,
and Mohammed Azam escaped in their car,
leaving Mohammed Afroz and Noor Mohammed behind.
But not before a video of the travelers was sent to
a WhatsApp group in the neighboring village of Murki,
falsely claiming the men were child kidnappers.
-The car was coming from here.
There was some wood cut there near the road.
So, from there, because the tires dipped,
the car went there.
Because the car was there, at that time, everyone said,
"Kidnapper," while beating them.
-The mob started pelting stones
and they were literally dragged out of the vehicle
and they started beating them.
-The police were called, but,
by the time they reached the scene,
the crowd was impossible to control.
The mob killed 32-year-old software engineer Mohammed Azam,
as well as injured the other men and several police officers.
So how did this dangerous rumor spread so fast
and why was no one able to stop it?
Fake news on WhatsApp is a significant problem in India,
its largest market,
where the platform has more than 400 million users.
At least two dozen people were killed in mob lynchings in India
connected to WhatsApp rumors in the first half of 2018.
The perpetrators are largely people who live in rural areas.
Pratik Sinha is a fact-checker in India
who covers misinformation online.
-There's a huge section of population
which is getting access to mobile and Internet services
for the first time in their lives
and they do not have the capacity to figure out
what is authentic, what is not.
-Before this incident, messages about child kidnappers
had been circulating via WhatsApp in India for months.
One viral video shows a child
being taken away by a motorcyclist.
But the footage is originally
from a child safety campaign in Pakistan.
The version shared widely on WhatsApp in India was edited.
It left out key context
that explained the video was made to create awareness.
-So these kind of videos and images were being circulated
to create panic.
There was this state of mass hysteria in many parts
because these villagers saw these videos
and they really believed that, yes, there is a gang out there,
which is there to kidnap their children.
-WhatsApp has been used as one of the main messaging apps
for disinformation campaigns in countries around the world.
The closed and encrypted nature of WhatsApp
makes it difficult to trace false information
and shut it down.
-WhatsApp is such a closed community.
They tend to be, again, our friends and family,
people that we know, and so, we trust the information,
or can trust the information that we receive
through the platform a lot more.
-In light of the mob lynchings in India,
WhatsApp has taken action.
The app labels when a message has been forwarded
and limits forwarding to five group chats.
This move reduced forwarded messages in India by over 25%.
WhatsApp and local experts groups also created
digital literacy trainings,
to teach users how to spot fake news.
The amount of mob attacks in India tied to
WhatsApp messages seriously decreased after 2018.
But violence sparked by child kidnapping rumors
is still a problem.
-When we look at these rumors on social media,
we know that they are not dying down.
They keep circulating.
It is not the speed at which the rumor is traveling.
It is the sustained nature of it which is a bigger problem.
-When WhatsApp launched in 2009,
it gave people across the world a chance to rapidly communicate.
Two billion people use the app.
But a lack of media literacy and government inaction
has allowed misinformation on the platform to spread,
often in ways that are difficult to see
and challenging to control.