There’s a Problem With Whatsapp and We Need to Talk About It
It’s 2021, no more of this, please
How many WhatsApp groups do you have? I’ve got at least four that are active daily. I’m sure it’s the same for you.
How many of those groups are full of memes, viral videos, and forwarded jokes?
I’m guessing all of them.
WhatsApp has become a digital fly-tipping zone where people mindlessly forward on unfunny, irrelevant, and uninspiring crap to dozens of people in one easy click.
If you don’t know what fly-tipping is (it might be British vernacular) it’s when people fill up a van with old mattresses, washing machines, cupboards, broken chairs, and general waste and then they dump it on the side of the road.
Go down many a winding country lane in the UK and someone somewhere has stuck a load of their unwanted crap on a grass verge.
They sure don’t show you that in The Holiday or Bridget Jones’s Diary.
Fly-tipping is a serious problem. It’s selfish, inconsiderate, and harmful. Just like the forwarded endless memes and videos on WhatsApp.
It’s junk for the mind.
There’s a special type of soul-numbing that comes with opening Whatsapp to see a message saying “forwarded many times”
It sort of makes you feel dead inside. It’s empty calories, like a Big Mac the mind, sent to your phone and shot out of the screen every time you open a group chat.
I wouldn’t care if it wasn’t so frequent — but there’s something else, something much more sinister about all of this; it can kill.
When WhatsApp Kills
In 2018, an edited and misleading video showing the (fake) kidnapping of a child swept through WhatsApp in India. It whipped up such hysteria. A man was falsely identified as a kidnapper by an angry mob and was beaten to death in the furor.
Despite warnings by police, the video was not real. This didn’t halt the escalation in violence. This was the tip of a brutal iceberg.
BBC News wrote a special feature on the WhatsApp hysteria. They noted “since 2018, in India alone 31 people died in 23 incidents over two years. 20 of these violent mob attacks occurred between April and July 2018.” [1]
Fake news is real, and its most pernicious effect on WhatsApp. Unlike other social media, WhatsApp feels personal. The news comes from friends and lands in private groups.
But let’s back up a little.
It’s pointless and willingly ignorant to blame WhatsApp for fake news or angry mobs. It is just a communication tool. Facebook themselves (CEO Zuckerberg bought the messaging service in February 2014 for a cool $16bn) realize how easily information travels between users on the platform, whether that be dangerous false stories or propaganda, or just another unfunny video you’ve seen 5 times before.
In 2018, Whatsapp began labeling messages as “forwards” and “forwarded many times.” In April 2020, “messages that have been identified as highly forwarded — sent through a chain of five or more people — can only be forwarded to a single person.” Facebook says this has reduced the spread of viral Whatsapp messages by “70 percent.” [2]
I’d suggest more needs to be done. All these changes mean is people have to forward to groups one at a time, rather than in bulk. And it still means relations with your best mates have been reduced down to memes and bullshit videos.
Fighting Back
I don’t want to sound dismissive of a serious problem, but fake news is a known issue. My problem — our collective enduring problem with WhatsApp–is it’s killing the art of conversation. It’s ruining friendships.
No one talks about this.
In the ’90s comedian Bill Hicks said:
“Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.”
Goodness knows what he’d say about social media and WhatsApp. Perhaps it’s like spray-painting your actual eyes or maybe blocking up your ears. You don’t need them anymore if the conversation has been boiled down to gifs and memes.
Two years ago, one of my WhatsApp groups came up with a rule of no forwarded videos, no viral content, no bullshit. Just plain old conversation.
And do you know what? It’s wonderful. An actual sanctuary from the rest of the internet noise.
Juxtaposed to this, in another group, I was forwarded a video of 4 people dropping dead when lightning hit the tree they were sheltering from in a storm.
That isn’t entertainment news, it’s not even propaganda, it’s plain disrespectful voyeurism, the lowest of the low. I don’t need to see that; I don’t want to see that, and yet it’s now how we communicate on WhatsApp.
Perhaps I’m ignorant and this is more how men communicate than women, perhaps it’s younger people rather than old (I find it hard to imagine your Grandma sharing a video of a deadly lightning strike) but until the Facebook demigods allow us individual control over what can and can’t be sent, the only way to fight back is to agree with others not to forward viral crap.
It sounds stuffy and old-fashioned — or at the very least, boring — but try it. You don’t miss what you don’t know you’re missing and you reconnect with friends.
Actual conversation… Imagine! Isn’t it worth it? I’m convinced people consume podcasts with such ravenous glee because they crave people actually talking.
Remember, the tech giants want you to use their platforms 24/7. Resistance is futile. Coming off WhatsApp in 2021 probably isn’t a workable solution.
What isn’t so futile is curation.
Make rules, set boundaries. WhatsApp doesn’t have to be the wild west of communication. Be the sheriff, run the bad guys out of town. It’s time WhatsApp became a law-abiding citizen.