Yahoo Finance Another effort in the fight against fake news: WhatsApp tries to stop messages from going viral
WhatsApp is taking its most dramatic step yet to cut down on fake news.
The app is testing a new feature that places limits on how many times a single message can be forwarded, WhatsApp announced Thursday. The update comes as Facebook scrambles to fight the messaging app's fake news epidemic, which has lead to a number of violent incidents in India.
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With the change, WhatsApp will restrict the number of times you can forward a single message. In India, the limit will be five chats; it will be 20 in other countries. The app will also remove the "quick forward" shortcut that appears alongside media messages.
In its announcement, WhatsApp spins the feature test as a way to "help keep WhatsApp the way it was designed to be: a private messaging app." But WhatsApp is dealing with a mounting crisis, caused by false information spreading throughout its app. In India, where WhatsApp is by far the most dominant messaging platform, false information has lead to violent outbursts, including several lynchings.
The Indian government has called on the company to address the issue, a plea the Facebook-owned service has apparently taken seriously. The messaging app, which has historically made relatively infrequent updates to its core product, has now made three significant changes in the last three weeks alone.
Previously, the app added new admin controls for group chats and introduced labels for forwarded messages. These updates, along with the latest limits on forwarded content, are designed to discourage content from going viral in the app's many group chats. The company is also running a public ad campaign and paying researchers to study the problem.
For Facebook, these updates come at a time when the company is facing critical questions about its role in policing content. CEO Mark Zuckerberg sparked outrage earlier this week when he appeared to defend the intentions of Holocaust deniers (he later tried to explain his comments), and the social network has been roundly criticized for not banning InfoWars even though the site regularly promotes false information.
Facebook announced earlier this week that it would remove posts "that could spark violence," according to The Wall Street Journal, but it's not clear how the company plans to enforce the policy or how it will decide what constitutes credible threats.
With WhatsApp, the company appears to be taking a much more straightforward approach. Because the company can't police the actual content in the messaging app, which uses encryption, they're instead focusing on making it more difficult for problematic messages to go viral in the first place.
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