WhatsApp Could Be The “Secret Battleground” In The Next General Election

WhatsApp is set to play a major part in 2024’s UK general election, with political strategists and parties already preparing to use the ubiquitous messaging app to organise their supporters and target campaigning.

But unlike traditional social media such as Facebook and Twitter (now X) which have dominated other recent elections, the closed, encrypted platform could pose a unique problem for journalists and fact-checkers working to curb the spread of disinformation, or at the very least, monitor public responses to the campaign. 

Meta, which also owns Facebook, bought WhatsApp for an estimated $22billion in 2014 and it is the most-used messaging platform in the world with 700 million active monthly users. It is estimated that 30 million people in the UK use the app regularly, and unlike social media apps such as TikTok whose audience disproportionately skews young, WhatsApp’s user base cuts across generational lines. 

“It’s the main form of communication. In many instances, it's replaced email as a way of conversing,” Giles Kenningham, a former head of press at No.10, who now runs the public relations consultancy Trafalgar Strategy, told PoliticsHome. He predicted WhatsApp would be a “secret battleground” for parties in 2024.

“For political parties, there may well be fake news and falsehoods being peddled at breakneck speed because everything happens so quickly on there,” he said. 

“Politicians need to think about how they can use their powers to limit the way these platforms can be exploited or can cause potential harm.”

As well as allowing users to forward messages around their own chats, WhatsApp has recently launched “Channels”, on which individuals or organisations can broadcast messages to large audiences, a feature