People are receiving messages warning them that people in their area are going to murder people and sell their body parts. Those suspected of being behind the crimes are beaten, lynched and killed. It is a pattern that is being played out repeatedly throughout India. And the tragedy is that the messages are entirely fake, the men being beaten and killed entirely innocent. The messages – which often describe horrifying crimes such as child abuse or organ harvesting – are being passed over WhatsApp, in a trend that is growing as the country gains access to the internet and to the communication technologies that it brings. 12 useful WhatsApp features you didn’t know existed Show all 12 1 /12 12 useful WhatsApp features you didn’t know existed 12 useful WhatsApp features you didn’t know existed Unsend messages You can unsend a message by tapping and holding it, hitting the Delete symbol and selecting Delete for Everyone. The feature works for all types of messages, but only if they were sent less than seven minutes ago. 12 useful WhatsApp features you didn’t know existed Dodge the blue ticks WhatsApp’s blue ticks show when sent messages have been read, but you can disable them buy going to Settings > Account > Privacy > Read Receipts. However, bear in mind that, by doing so, you’ll lose the ability to see when your own sent messages have been read. Another, more fiddly way of reading your messages without triggering the blue ticks, is enabling Aeroplane Mode before opening your messages - just remember to close the app before switching Aeroplane Mode off again. 12 useful WhatsApp features you didn’t know existed Hide your 'last seen' time Prevent your friends from finding out when you were last online by hiding your last seen time. Go to Settings > Account > Privacy > Last Seen. As is the case with disabling read receipts, hiding your ‘last seen’ time will also stop you from seeing anybody else’s. 12 useful WhatsApp features you didn’t know existed Limit data usage You can control how much data you munch through on WhatsApp by limiting the types of media you automatically download on a mobile connection. Go to Settings > Data Usage and choose the best option for you. 12 useful WhatsApp features you didn’t know existed Customise notifications If you’re expecting an important WhatsApp message from someone, set a custom notification for them by opening the chat, tapping their name at the top and hitting Custom Notifications. 12 useful WhatsApp features you didn’t know existed Format your messages To jazz up any of your messages, simply highlight it by tapping and holding it, hit the More Options key on the pop-up menu and tap the formatting option you want - bold, italic, strikethrough or monospace. 12 useful WhatsApp features you didn’t know existed Type hands-free You can get Siri or Google Assistant to type your WhatsApp messages out for you by saying either “Hey Siri” or “Okay Google”, followed by the name of the person you want to message and the actual contents of the message. 12 useful WhatsApp features you didn’t know existed Mark chats as unread When you’ve read a message but can’t reply to it straight away, you can set a visual reminder by marking it as unread. On Android, long-press the conversation, and on iOS, swipe from left to right on a chat. 12 useful WhatsApp features you didn’t know existed Email entire conversations You almost certainly won’t do this on a regular basis, but it’s a handy option to have. You can export entire conversations - complete with emoji and media attachments - by hitting More inside a chat a selecting Email Chat. 12 useful WhatsApp features you didn’t know existed Mass-message contacts You can send the same message to lots of your contacts without lumping them all into one group, much like the BCC option on email, by hitting the New Broadcast option on the app’s main menu. 12 useful WhatsApp features you didn’t know existed Pin conversations You pin up to three contacts and groups to the top of your WhatsApp conversation list by tapping and holding a chat, then hitting the pin icon. 12 useful WhatsApp features you didn’t know existed Make things easier to find You can easily mark key messages with a star, allowing you to find them easily when you need to. Just tap and hold a message and hit the star icon to save it, and return to it later by selecting Starred Messages in WhatsApp’s main menu. Local officials have pleaded with people not to believe or spread rumours circulated over social media. But they continue to spread, people continue to believe them – and that trust continues to have horrifying consequences in the real world. WhatsApp is of course not spreading the hoaxes and rumours intentionally, and is not responsible for creating it. But many of the technologies that are otherwise thought of as features are being abused to spread false information: it allows information to spread incredibly quickly, without any oversight or way of tracing where it came from. Recommended Five men lynched in India over child kidnap rumours on WhatsApp “Sadly some people also use WhatsApp to spread harmful misinformation,” WhatsApp said in a statement to Reuters. “We’re stepping up our education efforts so that people know about our safety features and how to spot fake news and hoaxes.” Police in India this week said they had arrested 23 people over the lynching of five men suspected of being members of a gang of child kidnappers. It is just the latest of a series of deadly mob attacks, which are being fuelled by fast-spreading, hoaxes and rumours being spread online. Police spokesman M Ramkumar said that the village had been abuzz for days with rumours spread through WhatsApp that a gang of child kidnappers were roaming around. That meant that when five men from a nomadic community and had gone to a house to ask for food, they were suspected of being part of that rumoured gang, New Delhi Television reported.<doc-sep>Indian authorities are scrambling to combat a spate of murders linked to rumours circulating on messaging application WhatsApp. Eight people have been killed across the country in the past few days, after rumours spread on the app about child kidnappers on the loose and a video was circulated that purported to show a boy being snatched. In the past year the murders of at least 30 people accused of being “child-lifters” have been linked to the platform, India’s most popular social media app with more than 200 million users. Police and state governments are scrambling to respond to the violence. One of the victims killed on Friday in Tripura state had been hired by the government to tour villages with a megaphone to try to dispel rumours that gangs of child kidnappers were prowling the area. WhatsApp, one of the most-used apps in the world with 1.5 billion users, has faced problems with misinformation in other large markets such as Brazil or Indonesia, but the consequences in India have been far more violent than elsewhere. In the latest incident on Sunday morning, five people belonging to a nomadic community were lynched in a remote village in Maharashtra state where police said messages about child kidnappers had gone viral. The group had reportedly stepped off a bus and were talking to a girl when they were surrounded by a crowd of up to 35 people, including children, and beaten to death. The mob turned on police when they arrived at the scene, injuring at least four officers. One video being blamed as a catalyst for the panic depicts a child being snatched from a south Asian street by two men on a motorcycle. The footage is part of a Pakistani child safety campaign; omitted from the version being spread on WhatsApp is a final scene in which the boy is returned. The Facebook-owned social media app has become ubiquitous in India and been employed in innovative ways, including to assist rural doctors to get real-time advice from more experienced counterparts in cities. But WhatsApp says it is limited in what it can do to stem the spread of harmful rumours without compromising the encrypted nature of the software. Last week it introduced a feature for group administrators to restrict who has the ability to post messages to others in the group. It is also beta-testing a way to clearly mark out forwarded messages – as opposed to those written by the sender – to encourage people to apply scepticism to posts sent to them by trusted friends or relatives. Ahead of the 2019 national elections, the app is also planning to partner with fact-checking websites in India as it did in the recent Mexican elections, where voters were encouraged to send rumours to a dedicated number which would provide factual information in response. WhatsApp’s user base in India has nearly tripled in the past four years as smartphones have proliferated and the price of data has crashed. But the trend has posed serious challenges in a country “where digital literacy is next to nothing in many parts”, according to Pratik Sinha, the founder of the fake news-busting website AltNews. “Because of the telecommunications revolution, mobiles have reached the furthest end of the country, but education has to go with it,” Sinha said. The Indian government is yet to respond to the crisis but their state counterparts have been experimenting with different ways to douse rumours that could incite violence including education programs and police hotlines where hoaxes can be debunked. Lynchings in India have become more prominent problem since 2015, when a Muslim villager in Uttar Pradesh state was killed by a mob after rumours spread that he was storing beef in his freezer. In that case the accusation was spread by a loudspeaker from a nearby temple. But Mohammad Ali, an Indian journalist who is writing a book about lynchings, said that crime and the killings of the past months had a common thread, linked to rising nationalist sentiment in the country. “Those who were lynched last month in Assam did not look part of the local culture,” he said. In Hyderabad last month, it was a migrant worker who was killed. In Maharashtra at the weekend, it was members of a fringe tribe. “The idea is to target anyone who seems different,” he said. “It is part of a discourse of nationalism and extreme polarisation the consumes anyone seen as the other.”<doc-sep>India's government has asked WhatsApp to take urgent steps to prevent the spread of rumours following a series of deadly mob attacks. At least 20 people have been killed in mostly rural villages across India in lynchings instigated by false information distributed on WhatsApp. The victims were innocent people accused of belonging to gangs trying to abduct children. India's ministry of electronics and IT (MEITY) said WhatsApp "cannot evade accountability and responsibility" after the killings were linked to "irresponsible and explosive messages" circulating on its platform. "Deep disapproval of such developments has been conveyed to the senior management of the (sic) WhatsApp and they have been advised that necessary remedial measures should be taken," the ministry said in a statement. Advertisement Image: Satish Bhaykre, 21, who was beaten by a mob Abuse of services such as WhatsApp "for repeated circulation of such provocative content" was a matter of deep concern, the ministry added. Last week, a woman was killed and dozens hurt in the mob attacks after a false rumour was spread on WhatsApp that child abductors were at large. Around 100 people attacked the victim and three other women in Ahmedabad, a city in the state of Gujarat. Police spokesman JA Rathwa said: "Half a dozen people surrounded the women as they were about to board an autorickshaw and started questioning them. "Soon the crowd swelled and pulled Shantadevi Nath and her companions out of the rickshaw and started thrashing them." Image: Women whose relatives were murdered in a lynching are led away from the crime scene by villagers in Dhule district The killings of innocent people have also occurred in states like Assam, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tripura and West Bengal. At least 16 mob lynchings have been reported since May. WhatsApp has begun to take evasive action, announcing that it has commissioned a set of global awards for research studying the spread of misinformation. "Through this new project, we look forward to working with leading academic experts in India to learn more about how online platforms are used to spread misinformation," it said in a statement. "This local research will help us build upon recent changes we have made within WhatsApp and support broad education to help people spot false news and hoaxes." WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app in India with over 200 million active users.<doc-sep>Nearly two dozen people have been arrested in connection with the mob killing of five men in northwestern India believed to be triggered by a WhatsApp rumor. It’s the latest in a string of attacks sparked by unconfirmed reports disseminated on the popular messaging app. Police in India’s west-central Maharashtra state apprehended 23 people after a crowd beat five men to death in a remote village on Sunday, the Associated Press reports. The men were suspected by local residents of being kidnappers, which police attributed to a message that circulated in the area on WhatsApp warning of active gangs of child abductors. Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis warned that “stern action will be taken against rumor mongers,” but the authorities’ reprimands have been powerless to stem the attacks, which have seen over 20 innocent bystanders killed by inflamed local vigilantes in recent months, according to Indian media. Here’s what to know: What happened? A crowd descended on a group of seven or eight men Sunday in an isolated tribal village in the Dhule district of Maharashtra state, according to Indian newspaper The Hindu. The men, members of a nomadic community according to The Hindustan Times, were suspected of being child kidnappers. After one of the men was observed speaking with a local child in a market, the group was detained and beaten by local villagers, bludgeoning five of them to death. Two police officers were also reportedly injured in the melee. “The mob was merciless,” said police officer M. Rajkumar, according to AP. An additional 17 people are suspected of taking part in the incident. Those already arrested have been booked for murder and rioting, and the victims were identified by the authorities, though their names have not been disclosed. Police also imposed a curfew in the village and have deployed auxiliary forces, but the area remains on edge, the BBC reports. Have there been similar cases? Twenty-seven people have been killed in 13 incidents of vigilante attacks inspired by false WhatsApp messages warning of child kidnappers or organ harvesters since May, according to the Times of India. Many of the attacks have targeted strangers in remote communities, including people from another region or who speak a different language from the mob. The attacks have also spanned the sub-continent, from the southern state of Tamil Nadu, where a 55-year-old woman was killed in early May after giving sweets to children, to northeastern Assam, where two men were killed after stopping to ask for directions in June, to western Gujarat, where a 45-year-old female beggar was killed last week. In another incident in Maharashtra this week, police came to the aid of a family of five, including a 2-year-old child, who were beset by a mob of thousands, according to AP. What are the authorities doing about it? The Indian government is mulling a response to the rumors circulating on WhatsApp, which has some 200 million monthly users in India, making the country the app’s largest market, according to the Washington Post. The app, which is ramping up outreach ahead of India’s national elections next year, has introduced new features to identify forwarded posts, making it easier to flag mass-disseminated messages. In the interim, local authorities have attempted to tackle the issue themselves. In Maharashtra, police have distributed pamphlets to debunk the messages; elsewhere, law enforcement has set up new monitoring stations in an attempt to identify and preempt inflammatory reports before they take off, according to the BBC. In June, police joined civilian protestors the southern city of Hyderabad to demonstrate against the spread of the rumors. “When rumors start circulating on social media, it takes some time to stop them completely,” Assam police representative Mukesh Agarwal told the BBC. The authorities face an uphill battle in rural areas, where digital literacy is low. In eastern Tripura, internet and SMS services were suspended last week after a “rumor buster” hired by the local government to educate local villagers was killed by a mob, Agence France-Presse reported. Get The Brief. Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. 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Incidents involving fake rumors spread via WhatsApp have increased across India in the last month. (CNN) — A mob in India lynched five people after rumors spread by WhatsApp messages prompted suspicion that they were child abductors, the latest in a spate of violent crimes linked to the messaging service. The victims were killed in Dhule district of the western state of Maharashtra on Sunday morning after locals accused them of being part of a gang of “child lifters,” police said. It was the fourth time in recent weeks that WhatsApp messages have inspired deadly attacks in India. The men, poor agricultural workers from a nearby district, were attacked by a group of about 40 people after they arrived by bus. They were surrounded by a crowd of almost 3,000 people. WhatsApp messages warning residents of possible kidnappers had been circulating in Dhule for 10 to 15 days. “Someone starts the rumor and it goes on from there,” M. Ramkumar, Superintendent of Police, Dhule, told CNN. “They (the victims) were traveling to different places to ask for alms,” he added. A police team reached the area after the lynching took place. Two policemen sustained injuries when the mob turned on the officers, said Ramkumar. Police confirmed a total of 23 people have been arrested in connection with the incident and police are searching for the remainder of the 40 accused. Those arrested have been charged for murder and rioting. The police have suspended internet and mobile facilities in Dhule district in an attempt to halt the spread of the false messages. Nationwide spread Earlier last week, three people were killed in the northeastern state of Tripura after social media, including WhatsApp, rumors of child abduction. One of the men who was killed Thursday had been hired by the Tripura administration to make announcements through a loudspeaker and warn residents against fake rumors. The death of a child during a family dispute earlier in the week had fueled fears of kidnap across the region. “All over social media, people were sharing (fake images and videos) that child lifters looking for human organs such as kidneys and livers were out in the area to kidnap children,” said Smriti Ranjan Das, a senior police official to CNN. On June 8, two men traveling in a SUV were lynched by a mob in the northeastern state of Assam after rumors that a child was being held in the car spread through the local village on social media sites Facebook and WhatsApp. The car was stopped by locals and the men were pulled out and beaten to death. In May, a transgender woman was killed and three others seriously injured in the city of Hyderabad when they were attacked by a mob of angry locals acting on WhatsApp rumors that the women were child traffickers. The messages, which went viral in the region, claimed that transgender women were behind a plot to kidnap young children. A day before the transgender attack, a man with mental health problems was beaten up in Pahadishareef, also in southern Hyderabad, over WhatsApp rumors that he was a member of a kidnap gang. Incidents involving fake rumors about child abductors have increased across India in the last month. State governments have begun campaigns to counter rumors mostly spread through WhatsApp groups. The police in Dhule are running ads in local newspapers and TV channels to create awareness about such false reports.