Spain is the European country that most trusts messaging apps for “informing” themselves, and why this can be dangerous

The Digital News Report, which analyzes information consumption habits in 46 countries, 24 of them European, also shows how widespread these messaging apps are in Spain. 83% of citizens use WhatsApp, and 23%, Telegram. Only Italy has higher usage percentages. 84% of Italians communicate via WhatsApp, and 28% turn to Telegram. However, there they do not use it as much for the purpose of getting informed as in Spain. WhatsApp is used by 30% of Italians and Telegram by 7%.

Spain is also at the forefront of Europe in another Digital News Report ranking. Along with Portugal, it is the country where a higher percentage of people share content they consider newsworthy through social networks, instant messaging apps, and email. In both countries of the Iberian Peninsula, 46% of citizens claim to distribute content they believe to be informative using these methods.

As we say, the high percentage of people using instant messaging apps to get informed poses a danger because they are spaces where there is no control over the contents. Messages are encrypted end-to-end, and only users know their content. Therefore, they have become channels in which it is common to detect large amounts of disinformation. We saw this at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The amount of hoaxes skyrocketed and, according to this study we already talked about, the main channels for spreading disinformation were WhatsApp and instant messaging apps. The data now presented by the Reuters Institute indicate that more than a third of Spaniards use these apps with the intention of getting informed.

At Maldita.es, we fight against this disinformation moving through WhatsApp with our chatbot and the help of our community. We ask our malditos to alert us with a message to (+34 644 22 93 19) about any suspicious content they detect in their WhatsApp groups. If it’s content we have already verified, we send the debunking immediately. If it is new disinformation, we investigate it and reply as soon as we have it verified.

Many times, the disinformation that reaches public platforms is already viral in the private ones. In a closed environment like WhatsApp, it is not possible to trace when a piece of disinformation first appeared, unlike platforms like Twitter or Facebook. However, through the record of alerts received by Maldita.es through our WhatsApp service, in the specific case of the hoax audio supposedly from Minister Gonzalez Laya about Bin Laden, we were able to see how it went viral on WhatsApp before Twitter and Facebook, and how the debunking helped to halt its spread.