Increased usage has potentially given rise to the spread of misinformation across apps like WhatsApp which has a reputation of being one of the platforms used to spread fake news causing mob lynching in India. Also, the service’s end-to-end encryption protocol makes it difficult to trace who spreads fake news. Apparently, after taking a few steps towards eradicating the potential of misinformation, WhatsApp has taken another step to curtail the spread.
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Originally, WhatsApp rolled out a feature to forward any message to 256 people at once but it has been extensively curtailed by now. WhatsApp has limited the number of times a message can be forwards such as it will detect if a message has been forwarded five times by a chain of people, it will give it a statuses ‘high-forwarded’ label. Once this label is obtained, users will be barred from sending the message to more than a single user at a time requiring him/her to select to contact, send the message and repeat for all contacts.
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This comes as a step further to what WhatsApp introduced last year limiting the ability to forward messages to five times where this measure steered down the forwards by 25 percent according to the Facebook-owned company.
WhatsApp took another measure by investing $1 million to the International Face-Checking Network before. Moreover, the company has promoted a chatbot from WHO which gives vetted information about the COVID-19 pandemic that has engulfed more than 1.3 million people at the time of writing this. This is also to prevent the alleged ‘cures’ that people have been forwarding that aren’t scientifically proven while the majority of them are outright false information.
From now onwards, WhatsApp will bar users from forwarding messages labeled as ‘high-forwarded’ and the expected friction going through the procedure is expected to compel users not to spread a message like before.
