Fake news, misinformation and hoaxes. They are all plagues that guide others to wrongdoings and wrong thinking.
In its mission to fight the spread of these apparent trends, especially after a string of lynchings that happened in India, Whatsapp is rolling out a label to help users identify forwarded messages.
What it does, is to basically mark messages that weren't originally composed by the sender in users' conversation. Those messages will have a 'forwarded’ label on top of them. The company hopes that the labels will give people extra context about where messages have come from, and to stop fake news and such horrific events from happening again.
According to WhatsApp's blog on July 10th:
This strategy highlights the company's goal of encouraging users to think before sharing messages.
While this is certainly a good move from WhatsApp, the feature is like either water or gasoline to be put on a fire.This is because labeling forwarded messages may not influence recipients to immediately assume they're false. It could have the opposite effect, like encouraging people to actually believe that they've been shared from elsewhere, and the information should be taken seriously because they're important.
Although WhatsApp can filter spam messages using filters to some degree without having to read messages, the company is unable to scan contents of messages to seek misinformation because messages in the platform are encrypted from end to end.
What this means, the company cannot intercept messages when they're passing through its servers to read them.
The labeling solution may help, if WhatsApp can empower everyone in a conversation to tackle misinformation. For example, if the label can indeed help the company in gaining real-time insight into the aggregated amount of forwarded messages sent on WhatsApp.
This requires careful deliberation and plenty of testings, not to mention some privacy concerns it may cause. So meanwhile:
"We encourage you to think before sharing messages that were forwarded. As a reminder, you can report spam or block a contact in one tap and can always reach out to WhatsApp directly for help," said WhatsApp.
Prior to launching the feature worldwide, WhatsApp had beta tested this forwarded label feature in India - the company’s largest market - and Brazil.
More than 300 million users use WhatsApp between the two countries, and in both, the platform has been linked to enabling the spread of dangerous viral rumors.