Letter to BS: WhatsApp should have a corporate office in India

It is praiseworthy to note that our Union Minister of IT, Law and Justice Ravi Shankar Prasad has asked the social media platform WhatsApp to take certain corrective measures. These are in view of the social havoc created by some posts/messages propagating innnuendos, rumours and gossip, all with a malicious and vexatious intent, purportedly to disturb social harmony and incite violence. 

WhatsApp has become part of our daily lives. But such messages by anti-socials and mischief mongers need to be seriously supervised, monitored, targeted and quickly booked to pre-empt the ensuing harm. The entity most competent to execute such an operation is the WhatsApp management itself.

WhatsApp does not have a registration policy for its users. It solely relies on the mobile number. Registering users can help filter the anti-socials better, when needed. The policy may be scorned at by law-abiding users. Every user, however, needs to uphold society’s well-being more than anything else.

It will be in fitness of things for India, to have a WhatsApp corporate office, with an eagle-eyed monitoring set-up. 

Anjan Chatterjee  

Nagpur