Whatapp announced on Tuesday that it would set a cap on the circulation of the messages after there was an increased circulation of the messages containing the coronavirus misinformation. When a message has been received by a chain of 5 users, it will be marked by the company’s server as a ‘highly circulated’ message and then the user will only be able to send this message to one person.
The new strategy will move forward and aims at creating friction to lower the speed at which data travel through the network.
In its blog post, the Facebook-owned company said they hoped their users would forward messages that contained useful information, jokes, entertainment material, or meaningful prayers and quotes.
Throughout recent weeks, the users have also arranged public moments to help the frontline health officials battling the coronavirus. But the platform said they also saw a big increase in the spread of false news about coronavirus and it’s important to slow down its pace so that the site can continue to be a safer place for users to talk privately.
Earlier, sending a message to up to 256 people with just a few taps was simple for the users and such messages were also not indicated for transmission. Owing to WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption, it was almost unattainable for the platform to induce who could spread hate speech through the network. This problem was once the reason for a crisis in India that tied the said platform to anarchy.
For the first time in 2018, the platform tested to set a cap on the number of times a message could be forwarded. The company put two arrows to show a message was sent and the platform limited the number of people a message could forward to 5 users in 2019 which is now pulled down to only one person.
This soft limit also allows you to send a message to as many people as you want so you will have to send the message to different contacts on your WhatsApp over and over again.
This friction is an important mechanism to reduce the pace at which the messages propagate through the network and over the last year, there has been a global decline of 25 percent in the forward.
Several reports and press releases have raised questions about Whatsapp fake news and it
seems like the Facebook-owned app has started to listen to some of its critics. Whatsapp has recently introduced a search button to verify the content of a message in Google Search, and the messaging network has also enabled a bot that provides checked information about COVID-19 and donates $1 million to the IFCN, which is in fact a positive small step towards web content verification.