WhatsApp India limits forwards to 1 chat at the same time to combat coronavirus fake news
WhatsApp on Tuesday put spokes in the ever-turning wheel of misinformation by restricting forwards to just one single chat at a time. The update has come to India first, within an indication of how widely the platform is being used to spread unverified information in the united states. It will soon be rolled out globally.
Similarly in August 2018, WhatsApp limited forwarding to five chats following the platform found it was being used extensively in India to spread misinformation, fake news and propaganda.
The app, which includes 2 billion users worldwide introduced the curbs globally around January 2019. NDTV reported that WhatsApp claimed the restrictions resulted in a 25 % reduction in forwards globally.
The report also cited consulting firm Kantar as having found a 40 per cent increase in WhatsApp consumption as COVID-19 started spreading globally. The messaging iphone app owned by Facebook was reported to have made the “greatest gains” in use among social media apps.
Now, with fake news threatening to derail efforts to combat the deadly coronavirus pandemic, WhatsApp, which has 400 million users in India, has introduced the stricter curbs in the united states.
However, you can still utilize the forward option many times to send a message to multiple users or copy a note and paste it to various chats.
To ensure that users got only authoritative information on COVID-19, WhatsApp had recently collaborated with the federal government of India to create a chat bot to answer queries.
Earlier, in August, WhatsApp added a ‘Forwarded’ label to messages that were not composed by a close contact of an individual.
Last month, the iphone app also took measures to mark certain forward messages as requiring verification, on its beta version. A magnifying lens icon appearing alongside the message prompted users to find online and verify the content. But because the update is not rolled out for all users, several messages and videos were still being shared without being flagged in virtually any manner.
Source: www.deccanchronicle.com
