its users in conflict scenarios, functioning as a multifunctional channel of communication to get the news from the conflict as well interpersonal chats to be in contact with those in battlefield. Similar duality between mass communication and private chat is also being highlighted on Telegram during the Ukraine war. Both Russian and Ukrainian made use of the app to get updates and news about the war, and the Ukrainian president Zelenskyy itself broadcast messages from its channel on Telegram (ALLYN, 2022) while also raising concerns about privacy within the platform.
Since WhatsApp claims to keep the app more personal and private (WHATSAPP, 2020a), the flow of messages can easily get viral within its wide and well-connected net-work, which may confuse the user about the intention behind that message and favor the viral spreading of misinformation on this platform.
All of those issues, summed to the fact that many users are getting the first access to the Internet through the first smartphone (NEWMAN et al., 2021). Those people do not know how to navigate the rest of Web beside the IMP they used to communicate.
They are not aware of the vastness that permeates the user’s network and how far a message can travel before reaching them. In this scenario, malicious users can abuse of the platform to instigate users to share their content and believe in false news by thinking that all they are receiving are part of a small and secure community of closed friends and family that they are members. This intimacy sense of the platform, combined to viral features it provides, turn it in a dangerous place where misinformation campaigns become very effective and hard to combat.
7.2 How Forwarding Chains Work on WhatsApp
When someone sends a message in a chat on WhatsApp, other users can select this message and easily share it by using the Forward button on WhatsApp. The forward feature allows users to share messages from an individual or group chat with another individual or group chat. Forwarded messages are then indicated with a “Forwarded”
label and a symbol, which alerts users that the message originally came from someone else.
There are, however, some limits and exceptions in the Forwarding process. Users can forward a message with up to five chats at one time. If a message has already been forwarded, you can forward it to up to five chats, including a maximum of one group chat5. WhatsApp also implemented the concept of messages that have been “Forwarded Many
5<https://faq.whatsapp.com/193766651706684/>
7.2. How Forwarding Chains Work on WhatsApp 124 Figure 7.1: A forwarding chain spreading messages until it reaches the label “Forwarded Many Times”.
GROUP
A
1 FORWARDED GROUP
B GROUPC
2 FORWARDED
GROUP
D
3 FORWARDED
GROUP
E
4 FORWARDED
GROUP
F
0 DIRECT 5+ FORWARDED
MANY TIMES
Forward Forward Forward Forward Forward
ORIGINAL SENDER MEDIA
Send
Source: The Author.
Times”. These messages are labeled on WhatsApp to indicate they did not originate from a close contact, more specifically, when a message is forwarded through a chain of five or more chats, meaning it’s at least five forwards away from its original sender as represented in Figure7.1. When a message is forwarded many times, it can only be forwarded to one chat at a time (WHATSAPP, 2020a).
Therefore, for a message to become a “viral” message by WhatsApp, it needs to travel a path of at least five hops from the author to reach the final user. Saying that, however, there are many examples of forwarding forks and interruptions that can make this count harder than it looks. Next, we will show some examples of this occurring during sharing media, making this a non-linear path.
For example, since users can select multiple chats to forward a message (up to five), each “path” created by this fork receive its own counter, meaning that forwards made in parallel paths will not be taken into account for the “Forwarded Many Times” labeling, as shown in Figure7.2.
Figure 7.2: Flowchart with a scenario of a forked thread of a spreading message chain on WhatsApp.
GROUP
A GROUPB GROUPC GROUPD GROUPE
Forward Forward Forward Forward
GROUP
F GROUPG GROUPJ
Forward GROUP
H GROUPI
GROUP
L
Forward
Forward Forward
GROUP
K
2 FORWARDED
2 FORWARDED 3 FORWARDED
4 FORWARDED
4 FORWARDED
2 FORWARDED 3 FORWARDED 4 FORWARDED 5+ FORWARDED MANY TIMES
5+ FORWARDED MANY TIMES 1 FORWARDED
0 DIRECT
Forward
Forward
ORIGINAL SENDER MEDIA
Send
Forward
Source: The Author.
7.2. How Forwarding Chains Work on WhatsApp 125 Figure 7.3: Flowchart with a scenario of a spreading message with a second user breaking the chain and starting a new thread with same media file.
GROUP
A GROUPB GROUPC GROUPD GROUPE GROUPF
Forward Forward Forward Forward
GROUP
X GROUPY GROUPZ
SECOND
SOURCE SAME MEDIA DIFFERENT
"FILENAME"
Forward Forward
Someone download same media and send it directly in other group
Start another thread
1 FORWARDED 2 FORWARDED 3 FORWARDED 5+ FORWARDED MANY TIMES 4 FORWARDED
0 DIRECT 1 FORWARDED 2 FORWARDED ORIGINAL
SENDER MEDIA
Send
1 DIRECT
Forward
Source: The Author.
Another issue is that the counter was created only for continuous forwarded chains.
Therefore, if a user in this process downloads a message content and resends it directly to someone else (instead of just use the forward button), it will reset the counter, interrupting the viral tracking, as shown in Figure7.3. Since downloading a multimedia message and sending it directly from your phone’s gallery or even copy-pasting a message is very easy for most of the users, it is very simple to get around the restrictions and fool the viral labeling of WhatsApp. Moreover, given that WhatsApp messages are E2E encrypted, the new message sent will be a completely different one, and WhatsApp will not even notice that both are the same.
Then, the network of a spreading message may build a complex flow, such as the example in Figure 7.4, in which even though there are 19 shares of the same piece of media, only a single one would be flagged as “Forwarded Many Times” in this scenario.
WhatsApp has implemented these symbols and tags to help users to distinguish whether a message is more personal or not, in special, the “Forwarded Many Times”
is used to label a message as something even more disseminated through the platform.
Because of this, in the next sections, we will refer to messages marked “Forwarded Many Times” asviral messages for more simplicity.
However, even though the system logs behind WhatsApp forwarding and its limits are very straightforward, they may present many instances that need a better under-standing during the actual use of the app, and some of them can be occult for the users;
especially regarding the feature of “Forwarded Many Times” flag which can be misleading of what that means.
7.3. Extending the Data Collection 126