As one of the most popular messaging app out there, WhatsApp has fake news problem is needs to address.
Previously, a WhatsApp user could forward a message to 20 individuals or groups. This time, the company is globally limiting the number of times a user can forward a message to just five people, in a bid to fight "misinformation and rumors".
"We're imposing a limit of five messages all over the world as of today," Victoria Grand, vice president for policy and communications at WhatsApp, said at an event in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta.
The five-recipient limit was first put into place in India in July after the spread of rumors on social media led to killings and lynching attempts. This limit was introduced alongside another feature that labels forwarded messages.
Following the announcement, the company expands this limit globally.
According to Carl Woog, the head of communications at WhatsApp: “We settled on five because we believe this is a reasonable number to reach close friends while helping prevent abuse.”
In India, WhatsApp’s largest market with more than 200 million users, innocent bystanders who were beaten to death by mobs angered by WhatsApp rumors of child kidnappers and organ harvesting rings.
This action made the country to blame the app for allowing such incendiary messages to spread.
While mob killing can happen from time to time and from one place to another in villages in India, but the phenomenon of messages spread through social media, and WhatsApp in particular, made everything to spread a lot faster and widely than ever before.
Originally, WhatsApp allowed one user to forward messages to up to 256 different conversation at once, to groups that have hundreds of people in them. Theoretically, if that forwarded message is fake news, the message can spread to tens of thousands of people at a time.
To cut down the number of fake news spreading on its platform, WhatsApp's idea is a simple one:
Cut down the number of messages a user can forward, to make WhatsApp a product isn’t built to share things broadly. As a result, fake news and misinformation will have a hard time going viral
In a good way, WhatsApp said that the measures have reduced forwarding by 25 percent globally and more than that in India, which had one of the highest forwarding rates in the world.
WhatsApp’s attack on virality is an fascinating idea, because as a free app, WhatsApp thrives because of users are actively using it.
As a free app with no apparent business model, limiting virality shouldn't dramatically impact user experience, as 90 percent of WhatsApp messages sent are between just two people. So this won't hurt WhatsApp, or even damage WhatsApp’s (nonexistent) money-making attempt.
This is a great idea that should be welcomed by everyone, as it should make WhatsApp a safer place to be. It also shows how the strategy could be applied to other messaging apps and social media networks that also suffer from misinformation problems.
However, fewer forwarded messages doesn’t actually mean that the Facebook-owned WhatsApp has improved its fake news problem in a big way.
Messages in the messaging app are encrypted, making it harder for the company to find misinformation and remove it