How a WhatsApp voice note triggered a mob attack on Ebola responders
An Ebola response team from the local Boga Youth Council arrived to spray a roadside market with disinfectant in Kasenyi, a village in Irumu district in eastern Congo, and encountered the admin of a local WhatsApp group, according to interviews with the volunteers. The young man accused the team of spreading Ebola and recorded a voice note claiming foreign agents had arrived in the village with spray pumps and Hazmat suits to spread the lethal virus. He also alleged that hundreds of agents had been paid to fan out along the shores of Lake Albert, infecting villagers’ homes.
Within minutes, a crowd gathered around the four volunteers, heckling them and shouting insults. Some slapped and punched them, confiscated the spray pumps, and marched the group about a mile to a nearby town where they were handed over to police. “We almost got lynched. We were just lucky,” one of the volunteers said.
The incident illustrates a growing obstacle for doctors and health workers trying to contain the outbreak: they must take breaks from treating patients in hospital wards to debunk claims circulating in WhatsApp groups, some of which have thousands of members. Voice notes present a particular challenge because they reach people who may not be literate, spreading rumors and falsehoods to populations that text-based platforms cannot easily reach.
“In this era of social media, information spreads rapidly. Within a very short time, these voice notes circulate around entire WhatsApp groups. They are very harmful,” said Mohammed Saani Yakubu, ActionAid’s country director in Congo. He said the most effective countermeasure would be to “quickly track down the misleading rumors and pull them down.” Without that ability, he said, charities risk sending hundreds of volunteers into harm’s way.
A spokeswoman for Meta Platforms, which owns WhatsApp, told the Journal that the platform is increasingly restricting users from sharing forwarded content by flagging messages with labels and limiting the number of times a user can forward messages. The spokeswoman did not respond to questions about voice notes being shared on WhatsApp groups in Congo, according to the Journal.
Chikwe Ihekweazu, head of the WHO’s Emergencies Program, told a briefing in Geneva that many of the newly reported Ebola deaths were people who died in their communities without ever reaching a health facility, describing it as “the most alarming finding.” He compared the situation to a fire: “There’s something driving the fire at its heart, and it’s also expanding at the same time.”
Confirmed infections surpassed 2,000 this month since the outbreak was first detected two months ago, with 754 deaths, according to the Congolese Health Ministry. In the 2018-20 epidemic, the second deadliest on record, it took 10 months for Ebola cases to reach that mark. The WHO has recorded the fastest rate of infections in any previous Ebola outbreak, including some 80 cases in a single day.
People with Ebola-like symptoms avoid seeking treatment, fearing they will be quarantined. In some cases, relatives flee homes when a family member dies without informing authorities, leaving highly infectious corpses unattended for days. “Some people are still treating themselves at home because of the fear of treatment centers and stigma outweighing trust in the response,” said Rose Tchwenko, Mercy Corps’ country director for Congo.
In the village of Bafwabango earlier this month, a WhatsApp rumor spread that a burial team was preparing to harvest organs from a patient who had died. Hours later, a mob torched the Ebola treatment center, forcing nearly a dozen patients to flee. A police officer was lynched as he tried to disperse the crowd, U.N.-sponsored Radio Okapi reported.
Days after the assault on volunteers in Irumu, the district recorded its first Ebola case, the Health Ministry said. The patient, a local farmer, had been selling cassava to traders from Bunia, the provincial capital of Ituri and the center of the current outbreak. The Bahema-Boga territory in Irumu is the region’s food basket, where traders flock to weekly markets to buy supplies ranging from grain to fish, but many residents still believe Ebola is a hoax.
The outbreak has spread to at least five provinces. Infections were confirmed this week in Kisangani, a city of more than 1.6 million people and a major transport hub linking the gold- and diamond-mining heartlands of eastern Congo to the west, raising the risk of wider transmission along the Congo River corridor, according to the United Nations. The Bundibugyo Ebola strain at the center of the outbreak has no approved vaccines or drugs.
In the rebel-held areas of North and South Kivu provinces and neighboring Uganda, the outbreak has largely been contained. South Kivu has gone 49 consecutive days without confirming a new Ebola case, exceeding the disease’s maximum 42-day incubation period, the U.N. said this week. The M23 rebel group last month said the outbreak was over in North Kivu, though the WHO has not made such a declaration. At some checkpoints in rebel-held territory, guards impose random searches on people’s phones to hunt down misleading messages, according to aid workers.