By: Priyasha Chakravarti
Encrypted messaging apps (EMAs) — private messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, Discord, Telegram, and Signal — are increasingly central to politics, including political action and narrative building. EMAs are closed networks in which information and metadata is limited to senders and recipients and which lack curation through traditional algorithms. These features encourage personalization and foster trust relative to social networks. At the same time, group sizes can exceed 1000 people, verification is limited, and there are few if any barriers to entry. These affordances, along with the encrypted feature, make messaging apps such as WhatsApp particularly important to political messaging.
Political parties can use EMAs to more easily campaign and effectively target voters, plan party operations, and rally their supporters, free of outside interference. At the same time, unverified information and hate speech can circulate largely undetected, particularly in countries with limited oversight and regulatory capacity. In many cases, false claims first originating in closed networks percolate to open platforms. Users may also find it harder to distinguish between chat groups run by official political parties versus those run generated by ordinary individuals or bots, opening the door to manipulation by unofficial or misleading sources.
WhatsApp, in particular, has some of the highest market shares among users in the developing world, including 98.9% in Brazil, 97.1% in India, and 96% in Argentina. With over 500 million active users, India represents WhatsApp’s largest user base, and has increasingly become a platform for political engagement in the run up to state and general elections. Political parties run millions of WhatsApp group chats, making the platform integral to electoral prospects. WhatsApp forwards often express political viewpoints, but without links to news organizations and web sites for verification. While a “forwarded label” was introduced in mid-2018, mass-forwarding can make it more difficult to trace the origin of content. Similarly, in South Africa, 96% of Internet users are on WhatsApp, using the platform as a one-stop shop for messaging, news, and even banking. Political disinformation in South Africa surrounds topics such as race, immigration, and voting rights. In Brazil, concerns extended to deepfakes shared on Telegram and WhatsApp around municipal elections in 2024.
Encrypted messaging apps like Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram have also gained traction in the United States amidst rising data privacy concerns. WhatsApp was banned on U.S. House of Representatives’ devices in June 2025 as it was deemed a high-risk platform due to concerns around lack of transparency and security threats. Yet despite such concerns, 13% of American internet users are on the platform, and it is especially used and trusted by minority and diaspora groups in the United States. Over the years, WhatsApp has taken steps to both prevent disinformation and enhance privacy. For example, the platform introduced forwarding labels and limits, business verification methods, multilingual AI features, as well as disappearing messages. However, unlike Facebook, it does not offer a verification mechanism for group chats created for election campaigning purposes.
While it is difficult to track, regulate, and moderate content within EMAs, experts have proposed several recommendations to enhance transparency and accountability on these platforms. Some proposed interventions target the EMAs themselves. For WhatsApp, this builds on previous steps they have taken to introduce forwarding limits and partner with independent fact checking organizations. But WhatsApp and other such messaging apps could still do more to share metadata, internal design, and moderation practices with researchers. They could also implement separate sets of rules for large-scale communications (such as political campaigning) compared to messages intended for small group chat conversations.
But as the use of EMAs grows around the world, user education and media literacy also remains crucial. Since these platforms are encrypted and often perceived as more trustworthy, users bear responsibility for engaging with content critically, particularly when messages have been forwarded multiple times, appear altered, or circulate widely within large community groups. Governments across the Global South seek to balance competing priorities in regulating digital platforms, safeguarding free expression and privacy while curbing hate speech and disinformation. Lessons from the Global South countries can also help the United States and other developed economies anticipate and address similar challenges as the use of closed-network apps continue to grow.
Priyasha Chakravarti is a Spring Intern for the Communications team at ORF America.