Was The Guardian’s WhatsApp reporting ‘irresponsible’ or fake news?
If you don’t seek out alternate opinions are you supporting a fake news model? David Glance examines the recent reporting of The Guardian about potential backdoors in the WhatsApp software code as case in point, in this cross-posting from The Conversation.
The Guardian has drawn the ire of a large number of cryptography and security experts by publishing a story claiming that WhatsApp has a security backdoor that would allow it, or governments, to snoop on encrypted messages. 
The group of experts, led by Associate Professor Zeynep Tufekci have written an open letter demanding that the article is retracted and for The Guardian to issue an apology for the misleading claims.
The article, written by freelance journalist Manisha Ganguly reported claims originally made by a UC Berkeley PhD student Tobias Boelter last year. He showed that under certain conditions a government could, with the cooperation of WhatsApp, gain access to the content of a small number of messages.
The consensus of 40 of the most respected people from the security and cryptographic community however was that the behaviour described by PhD student Tobias Boelter, and sensationalised in The Guardian article, was simply a design decision taken by WhatsApp developers and represented a very small risk, if any, to the vast majority of users.
