This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.
When Rahul, a gun seller from the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, first used WhatsApp to expand his customer base over a year ago, he was unsure of his prospects, he told Rest of World. Now, he fields at least 100 business queries on the Meta-owned app every day, he said.
Rahul, whose last name has been withheld by Rest of World because he feared repercussions, regularly posts photos of his wares on WhatsApp groups that he joined through publicly accessible links or started himself. Prospective customers contact him directly. Rahul doesn’t bother too much with why they want guns. “Someone might be buying it to kill someone, but to us, they say that they’re buying it for their safety only,” he said.
Hordes of sellers like Rahul are contributing to the “thriving” illegal firearms marketplace that has emerged on WhatsApp in India, according to research conducted by Digital Witness Lab – a Princeton University center that builds tools to investigate social media platforms – which was shared exclusively with Rest of World.
The trade appears to be rampant even though Meta’s policies prohibit the sale or advertisement of firearms, and India has among the strictest legislations around gun ownership in the world. Such exchanges may be in violation of the law. An Indian police official told The Statesman in 2021 that gun sellers advertising on social media platforms were breaching India’s laws, which mandate licenses from the government to own and trade in firearms.
Between April 2024 and January 2025 – a timeframe that included the country’s general elections last year – Digital Witness Lab’s researchers found more than 8,000 messages advertising firearms across 234 WhatsApp groups in India.
All the groups are publicly accessible, and some have hundreds of members, according to the researchers. The numbers, “which are almost certainly an undercount”, show “the ease and pervasiveness through which these groups exist in India,” Surya Mattu, the data journalist and engineer who led the lab at the time of this research, told Rest of World. WhatsApp is enabling gun sales at a scale that simply wasn’t possible before the platform, Mattu said.
WhatsApp did not respond to specific queries related to the research. The platform “works closely with law enforcement agencies in India and responds to requests based on applicable laws and our policies,” a company spokesperson told Rest of World. “If we identify accounts taking illegal actions we ban them from WhatsApp.”
Meta’s platforms have previously been accused of facilitating firearms trade in India – WhatsApp’s largest market with over 400 million active users. Last October, the Uttar Pradesh police reportedly busted a gang that sold weapons through Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. In 2023, Meta took down Facebook posts that offered guns on a forum for religious extremists only after The Wall Street Journal reached out to the organisation for comment on a story about the posts.
The company has faced similar allegations globally. A 2024 study found several instances where Meta had approved advertisements for guns, accessories, and ammunition, which ran in the European Union. Another research study from 2022 identified dozens of firearms-related listings on Meta’s e-commerce platforms in the U.S.
In India, the use of WhatsApp by gun sellers may exacerbate an existing problem. Despite strict laws, the country is plagued by the widespread production of illegal firearms, such as widely available country-made pistols. In 2022, for instance, 97% of the 104,390 firearms seized by Indian authorities were unlicensed, improvised, or crudely made, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau.
Content moderation on WhatsApp is difficult, since the platform’s chats are end-to-end encrypted. But the Digital Witness Lab researchers found 12 instances in which group topics and descriptions contained references to gun sales. This is unencrypted data that WhatsApp can monitor, Mattu said. That it is going unchecked suggests the company isn’t doing even the “most basic thing”, to curb such content, he added.
According to the Digital Witness Lab researchers, about half the profiles they studied that posted gun advertisements from India were business accounts – specialised profiles equipped with additional features for customer operations. Rahul operates one, too. WhatsApp’s business platform policy explicitly prohibits these accounts from trade involving weapons.
Mattu and his colleagues stumbled upon the gun advertisements when they were monitoring publicly accessible groups ahead of India’s general elections last year, as part of their WhatsApp Watch initiative. According to the researchers, the groups included those that posted explicitly poll-related content, were affiliated with political parties, or self-identified as Hindutva supporters.
The researchers noticed that many gun advertisements started with the phrase, “Ram-Ram Namaskar jis mere bhai ko samaan 🔫 chahiye” (“Greetings, my brother who wants stuff 🔫”). They searched groups and posts for this specific phrase.
As a result, the study’s findings are limited to WhatsApp posts or groups that used this particular phrase. The researchers found that many members claimed an affiliation with Hindu right-wing organisations and posted discriminatory content against Muslims and Christians. Rahul manages about six-seven such groups. They range from 200 to 1,000 members each, and comprise kattar (staunch) Hindus, he told Rest of World.
Some groups are named after Lawrence Bishnoi, an incarcerated gangster accused of murder, extortion, and drug trafficking. Digital Witness Lab also observed conversations in which users either pitched themselves as hitmen for hire, or solicited the services of one, Mattu told Rest of World. “Things as banal as like, go scare my landlord, or my wife’s parents are complaining about me to her, so go scare them,” he said.
Many groups identified their location as states in northern India infamous for illegal firearms, the Digital Witness Lab researchers noted. “In a previous world, you would have to go to those places or have contacts in those places to actually get access to these weapons. And now you can actually sit in Bombay or Delhi, or anywhere in India, join these WhatsApp groups … and now you can get access to a WhatsApp number that will sell you these guns,” Mattu said.
Both Rahul and Deepak, a gun seller from Uttar Pradesh who has been in the business for 15 years and advertised on WhatsApp for two, told Rest of World they received enquiries from all over India. According to Deepak, the cost of delivery is typically borne by the buyers.
The relative security offered by WhatsApp is vital, said Deepak, who identified himself only by his first name. “If we talk on a normal call, then the number might be tracked,” he said. Deepak receives about 400–500 daily queries, which typically translate to 4 to 5 sales. He makes up to Rs 4 lakh per month from gun sales through WhatsApp.
Platforms such as Instagram, X, and Telegram do not interest Rahul because they are “for big-shot people”, whereas a WhatsApp group can “connect all kinds,” he told Rest of World. He previously had a YouTube channel, but that was hacked. He now conducts his commercial dealings entirely on WhatsApp.
The Indian police officials Rest of World spoke to said they had not encountered any cases of gun sales on WhatsApp within their jurisdictions. In Rajasthan, “we have not noticed any such activities or received reports of such groups,” said Pradeep Mohan Sharma, deputy inspector general of the state police at the time of the interview.
Hemant Tiwari, who heads Delhi police’s cyber unit, said that although his department blocked some accounts from nearby districts that “showed guns” – mostly on Facebook and X – they had not yet dealt with cases of weapon trade. If gun sales are taking place on WhatsApp, then it’s “a complete failure of WhatsApp [and] social media intermediaries,” Tiwari said.
Illegal firearm sales over WhatsApp need to be “primarily dealt [with] by law enforcement rather than be looked at or viewed as a content moderation problem,” Apar Gupta, founder-director of the digital rights group Internet Freedom Foundation, told Rest of World. It’s surprising that the Indian police hasn’t yet caught on to the scale of the trade when researchers were able to do so, he said.
The risk of being caught doesn’t bother Deepak. “I am not afraid, that’s why I am doing this business,” he said. “I have strength, and I have guts.”
This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.
