Waking up to the danger of WhatsApp groups and what your organisation can do about it

WhatsApp groups are here to stay, what do we do about them?

Institutions, whether they are colleges, schools, businesses or public bodies now have a choice: lose influence to the WhatsApp juggernaut or get back in the driving seat by owning the online conversation space themselves.

I’ll quickly explain the issue in this article, however if you still don’t think there’s a problem then go away and read this long Guardian article What’s wrong with WhatsApp and come back here when you’re ready to hear the solution.

Secret WhatsApp groups abound wherever a community exists. Just as IRL (In Real Life) cliques and friendships form, so online do groups form around the main organisation.

Most groups are well meaning (a chance to connect), harmless (memes and gifs) and can play a useful role (does anyone know what the login password is?).

So far so normal.

However, what most groups don’t realise is that they are using a military technology (very high quality end to end encryption, the internet itself) and so they don’t realise they are holding a smartphone enabled weapon in the palm of their hands. One whose high trust quotient easily leads to sharing of local conspiracy theories and ‘negative solidarity.’

It’s easy to just blame WhatsApp for this:

A communication medium that connects groups of up to 256 people, without any public visibility, operating via the phones in their pockets, is by its very nature, well-suited to supporting secrecy. — What’s wrong with WhatsApp

But the reality is that there are hundreds of alternatives that could take its place: private Facebook groups, Telegram, Signal and many many more. Secret groups are a fact of internet life, besides taking down the whole internet they are here to stay.

WhatsApp groups can not only breed suspicion among the public, but also manufacture a mood of suspicion among their own participants — What’s wrong with WhatsApp

So, for any institution, what is the solution?

I believe that most people in a community are well meaning, kind and thoughtful. Their objective in joining any community group, online or otherwise, is to strengthen the community, not to weaken it.

Of course there are those in any community who, often temporarily, feel slighted, perceive injustice and need a space to vent. The question is how can this venting be kept in its proper context? It’s too easy for a drunken midnight rant to be seen as a fervently held proposition that must be argued and discussed by others for the next two days.

The digital community has already has developed a solution to this problem, we just don’t use it.

It’s called “moderation”. It means having an agreed set of content rules for any community and a subset of participants willing to enforce those rules over others by editing or removing posts altogether.

For institutions this can sound like a lot of work. “With all that’s going on my teachers/staff/clergy/youth workers/{insert paid staff role here} don’t have time to moderate the discussions of everyone we’re talking to.” might be a typical point of view.

And of course that’s right, you don’t have time.

However, again there are solutions to this — using group participants themselves as moderators.

Techniques like gamification come in handy here — many communities give points for good activity and then assign moderation roles to ‘super participants’ — the ability to edit others posts, for example, then becomes a community status you can work your way up to.

Different communities elect moderators in their own way — Stack Overflow allows users with a certain number of points to vote on other user content while has full on virtual elections for its most senior (and most powerful) site moderators, GiffGaff has staff that are known as educators while it appoints active community members as moderators and so on.

I have built a community reputation on Stack Overflow over many years that allows me to answer questions, comment and vote on others answers

One thing to mention that’s crucial — this is not really a technical problem for institutions (there are myriad community technologies that can map to the business rules you set in place). This is more an organising one — what communities will we support, how will we support them, how will we retain control and influence of the critical parts of the conversation. This is something to be discussed at board level in every organisation.

I suggest a step by step plan to persuade your communities off WhatsApp as follows (it won’t happen by coercion and it won’t happen overnight):

1. Baseline all the major online groups you have heard about in your community. You need to know what’s out there on WhatsApp and Facebook right now.
2. Ask your community (via anonymous survey if necessary) to list all the community related online groups they are part of. This a way to pick up the groups you haven’t heard about.
3. Identify the groups that are closest matched to your existing sub-communities — a church might choose congregations, ministries or services, a school might choose classes and so on, a local government might choose towns or streets.
4. Get together a community strategy. Guild.co have a good document — Community Based Marketing that’s worth reading, Thinkific have put together a good article — 7 Steps to building an online community. otherwise just search for “how to build an online community” and you’ll get going, the web is awash with advice.
5. Appoint a community manager who will execute the strategy. Having a visible leader always helps.
6. Choose the tech. There are lots out there — try to find ones where you own the content, can handle multiple channels and the list of users. For 2021 I personally am looking seriously at Discord and Guild.
7. Create the groups you need, launch and remember the 3 c’s of communication: communicate communicate communicate. You’ll need to keep plugging the groups for the next 2–3 years. Don’t forget your overall objective should be to get the conversations to happen in your environment where they can be moderated, healthily rebutted and healthily discussed. Don’t expect an easy ride but also don’t take every venting too seriously.
8. Incentivise — finally don’t forget you are in competition with self organised whatsapp groups — you need to make your online space better. Think of it as running a bar — why should people come to your bar rather than the gather round the moonshine kiosk down the street — exclusive content, incentives, rewards and celebrations all play a part here.

So, to summarise:

• All institutions risk losing influence and worse to secret online groups.
• To combat this they must bring the conversation into ‘owned’ online space which can be moderated as required.
• A written community strategy is the first step to get going with.

Happy 2021.