WhatsApp’s way to fight coronavirus fake news worked

WhatsApp is taking all possible measures to reduce the spread of misinformation during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Ever since people have started staying at home to prevent the spread of the virus, there has been an increase in the number of messages containing false and fake news going viral on many social media platforms, including WhatsApp. To eliminate this problem, the Facebook-owned messaging service has banned messages that are forwarded too often or that are forwarded frequently and now it seems that the company’s decision is working. WhatsApp claims that the number of excessively forwarded messages has reduced by 70 percent.

Although this reduction in forward messages cannot be considered a direct stop to the spread of misinformation, it can be considered a step in the right direction for the time being.

WhatsApp released an update earlier this month to reduce the limit on forward messages. After this update, users are no longer able to forward messages that have been previously sent five or more times to the same person at a time. However, the thing to note here is that there is a ban on forwarding these messages, but users can still send these messages to their contacts by copy pasting the text. Even if there are other options available to users, a 70 percent reduction after the implementation of this limit is definitely a success.

A previous update limited excessive forwarding of messages to five contacts at once. Due to this, the number of message forwarding globally decreased by 25 percent at that time.

Preventing the spread of misinformation is extremely important in the time of the coronavirus pandemic, especially when the primary method of communication has become messaging and calling. WhatsApp is used by a large number of people for communication and sharing information. At present, there are millions of users of WhatsApp around the world and this step taken by the company is important in such a sensitive time.