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Before the public health crisis, WhatsApp users limited themselves to forwarding messages to five users at a time. This old limit was first introduced in India in an attempt to spread the misinformation in the chat app. After great success: WhatsApp said spam messages were down by a quarter (25 percent) at the time, the messaging app decided to implement the limitation worldwide.
Of course, the last restriction doesn’t stop you from sending the same text messages over and over to each of your contacts, but it will make the task that much more laborious. And that seems to be discouraging people.
And it appears that the new limit introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic has seen even greater gains in the fight against disinformation.
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According to WhatsApp, a person’s limit has seen a 70 percent reduction in the number of highly forwarded messages. WhatsApp defines a “highly forwarded” message as any text that has been passed five or more times.
This generally indicates a viral message, designed to be shared with multiple friends and family. During the outbreak, several conspiracy theories, rumors, and hoaxes arose about the new coronavirus, including one that 5G masts have affected the spread of the virus that led people to burn equipment across the UK.
In a statement, WhatsApp, which is comfortably the most widely used messaging app on the planet with two billion users, said: “WhatsApp is committed to doing our part to address viral messages. We recently introduced a limit for sharing ‘messages highly Forwarded ‘to just one chat. Since this new limit was established, globally there has been a 70 percent reduction in the number of highly forwarded messages sent on WhatsApp. This change is helping to make WhatsApp a place for personal conversations and private. “
That is an impressive drop. However, since all the conversations, voice memos, photos, video calls and documents sent on WhatsApp are encrypted from end to end, it is difficult to track if these measures are reaching the correct messages.
However, WhatsApp appears to be happy with the progress, so hopefully harmful misinformation about the coronavirus doesn’t travel as fast, or as wide, as it was during the first few weeks of the pandemic.
The news comes when WhatsApp doubled the number of people who can participate in a video chat within their chat application. This is designed to help people stay in touch while maintaining the rules of social distancing.
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