Published Paper Details:

Fake news spreads like a virus these days. Mindless and incessant forwarding of WhatsApp messages without verifying the correctness of such messages is leading to the spread of fake news, and many a time, such messages assume racial and religious overtones. Therefore, dealing with these in real-time and in an accurate scale is a critical issue. Whatsapp made a few changes in the app for Indian users, like labeling forwarded messages, removing the quick forward button, and limiting the number of allowed forwards to five people or five groups at a time. It did stop the individual forwards carrying nonsense messages and fake news but it continues to revel in Whatsapp groups. Complete anonymity is one of the biggest problems with this menace of fake news. WhatsApp needs to take more concrete steps to ensure that each time a message is sent, it must have some indication of the sender’s identity. This would make it easier for the law enforcement agencies to get hold of the person who actually created the message. Our proposed system creates accountability for every user who shares a forwarded message, so as to make them think twice before sending an abusive message or forwarding fake news. Forwarded messages don’t have accountability, which leads to the problem of forwarding them too many times. So to stop this from happening, we have created a way of identifying the senders through a hash code, which can be found by selecting the message and clicking on the hash info option. This displays the hash code as well as the hash pointer for that message. By using this feature, every user knows that they will be held accountable whenever they forward a message. This can stop people from sending fake news and helps us to identify every person to which it has been sent as well as easy identification of the source. This feature also helps users to have a better overall user experience, as providing users with the ability to stop the propagation of fake news helps them to trust the app more easily.