2.3 Research Gap
3.1.4 Similarities and Differences of IMPs
All three messaging platforms support public groups, and the most common way to invite other users to a public group is through a group URL (also referred to as the “invite”
URL) with them. The group URLs of each IMP follow one or more distinct patterns. On WhatsApp, for instance, group URLs have the pattern “chat.whatsapp.com/<gID>” with gIDrepresenting a unique identifier of the group, which is automatically generated by the WhatsApp messenger application when the group is created. After a review of each plat-form’s documentation and also manually examining the URLs of each platform on Web, we were able to compile a list of six patterns employed across these messaging platforms.
These six patterns have the following prefixes or host values: chat.whatsapp.com/, t.me/, telegram.me/, telegram.org/, discord.gg/, and discord.com/. All those in-vite URLs are widely found on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. This corroborates that group feature is a key feature explored by users to create public group chats to discuss and share interests in their social media. In Chapter 6 we will further investigate those groups and this public ecosystem of the instant messaging application.
An important characteristic present in the platforms is the possibility to forward content between groups and contact. This brings them closer to the social network such as Facebook and Instagram, as it allows to share content and create a network of messages spreading through their users. In Discord, it is more restricted. There and in Telegram, the forwarded message is attached with some metadata regarding the original author.
In Telegram, it is possible to even see how many times it was forwarded and how many users visualized that message. On the other hand, with WhatsApp, users can send their messages up to 5 other contacts/groups, and only for highly sent messages it is limited
3.1. Comparing WhatsApp, Telegram and Discord 50 to just 1 contact per time6. Furthermore, in WhatsApp, the only difference between an original message and a forwarded one is a tag “Forward” in the message header. There is no further information on who or when it originated. Also, none of the users know that their messages were forwarded in the systems. The forwarding option is one of the key features abused by misinformation campaigns as it has a potential scalability to the content reach thousands of users, while at the same time it provides anonymity to the author who created the content.
While all messages on WhatsApp are sent via end-to-end encryption and users can not disable even if they want it, Telegram has this option only for secret chats options, which means that channels and public groups are not protected by this feature. Discord works in a different way, they do not have encryption at all, but it is a moderate social media as the company can investigate and eventually ban accounts and whole servers that are not to agree with the terms of the Discord 7. Thus, WhatsApp looks more secure in communication, although it is also the most closed platform in which most of the abusive content is hidden under this private structure of groups.
Probably the more notable distinction between WhatsApp and other two platforms is the group’s size. While WhatsApp limit is 256 members per group, there are chat groups up to 200K members in Telegram and 500k in Discord. Moreover, in Telegram, for channels, that are broadcast groups of messages, there are no limits of members, accumulating millions of users8. In Discord, those groups are actually called servers, and they supply a lot of tools to the moderators of these groups to manage their chats.
There, for instance, one can create subgroups of text or voice channels and give individual permissions to the members, managing to disperse the users from a unique server among its different channels. These large groups allow the information to quickly be sent to multiple users at once, which differs a lot from the direct conversations also present in those platforms. This shows a duality of the IMPs that works at the same time for private chat and mass communication.
These aspects of the platforms show why WhatsApp is a fertile and susceptible environment to spread misinformation. Users feel secure within the platform, talking to family and close friends, but simultaneously they are in contact to a public sphere of groups that rapidly share messages anonymously. For final users, it may not be a simple task differentiating both kinds of content while using the app, principally for those who are getting in contact with the internet for the first time with a smartphone.
6Note that it was only after 2018 that WhatsApp reduced this forward limit to 5 in Brazil. It was the second restriction, as initially users could forward up to 256, then it was reduced to 20 before it reached the currently 5 limitation.
7<https://www.engadget.com/discord-transparency-report-222737366.html>
8<https://appsgeyser.com/blog/biggest-telegram-channels/>
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Chapter 4
What is the WhatsApp?
WhatsApp Messenger, or simply WhatsApp, is an Instant Messaging Platform system, cross-platform centralized messaging, and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service founded in 2009 by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, former employees of Yahoo!. As it sounds, the name WhatsApp is a pun on the phrase “What’s Up”. It allows users to send text and voice messages, make voice and video calls, and share multimedia content such as images, videos, audios, and documents. WhatsApp’s client application originally runs as an app from smartphones, but it can be also used in desktop computers, as long as the user’s mobile device remains connected to the Internet while they use the other device.
In 2013, WhatsApp had already reached approximately 200 million active users, had a team of only 50 members and was valued at about 1.5 billion dollars1. The client application was created by WhatsApp Inc. of Mountain View, California, which was acquired by On February 19, 2014, Facebook, Inc. announced it was acquiring WhatsApp for US$19 billion, its largest acquisition to date2. Already at that time, because of a great distrust of Facebook by a part of users, the acquisition caused that a considerable number of users to try and/or move to other IMPs as 8 million shows to migrate to Telegram3 and 2 million new users were registered in Line4. Still, it then became the world’s most popular messaging application by 2015, and finally reach two billions users worldwide as of February 2020 (WHATSAPP, 2020b). It has become the primary means of internet communication in multiple locations, including Latin America, India, and large parts of Europe and Africa5.
Today, WhatsApp is an instant communication application in which smartphone users can exchange messages, images, videos, audios, and make audio and video calls.
Amidst a huge flow of information with more than 55 billion messages and 4.5 billion images a day around the world, WhatsApp is the second most used social platform in the
1 <https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive-inside-story-how-jan-koum-built-whatsapp-into-facebooks-new-19-billion-baby/>
2<https://about.fb.com/news/2014/02/facebook-to-acquire-whatsapp/>
3 <https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/24/telegram-saw-8m-downloads-after-whatsapp-got-acquired/>
4<https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/25/line-gets-whatsapp-outage-bump/>
5 <https://www.wired.com/2016/04/forget-apple-vs-fbi-whatsapp-just-switched-encryption-billion-people/>
4.1. Public Groups Chats 52 world, only behind Facebook itself.
Figure 4.1: Activity numbers from WhatsApp.
Source: <https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000631/Connectinganuser-users-all-days>.
Unlike social platforms like Twitter and Facebook, in which there is platform mod-eration with tools to investigate content posted in these environments, WhatsApp’s end-to-end (E2EE) encrypted framework creates a very different and more complex scenario to observe. Although much of the communication in this messaging app is direct and private between two users, there are a lot of groups where the conversation involves a larger number of members. Only users involved in the conversation, however, have access to the shared content. Therefore, to monitor and collect the content that circulates on WhatsApp, it is necessary to be effectively part of interest groups.
On WhatsApp, every user account is linked to a valid phone number. Authentica-tion with a smartphone is required during account creaAuthentica-tion. Even the web version of the application must be synchronized with the smartphone for the user to be able to use it.
With a proper account, the user can modify basic information such as their name, photo, and a status message. These users can add and send messages to contacts directly from their mobile contact or, in what will be the focus of this project, chat groups.
4.1 Public Groups Chats
WhatsApp allows individuals to create and join group messages with up to 256 users total, a feature that has significantly influenced in the popularity of the app. These
4.2. Messages 53