The most used messaging app in Europe and many other countries around the world is going to undergo a new change to prevent the spread of fake news. Soon you will only be able to forward a message sent to you to one group every time.
The spread of hoaxes and fake news is an obvious problem in social media these days. Many people get information on a daily basis solely by using platforms like Facebook or Twitter where fake news is rampant, and they pay more attention to the messages they receive on WhatsApp than what their common sense tells them. In a further attempt to reduce the use of this messaging app for spreading fake newsWhatsApp will limit the retransmission of messages to make their mass distribution more complicated.
This new message forwarding feature has already been active with some WhatsApp for Android Beta users for weeks, and now begins to appear in the beta of WhatsApp for iOS, as reported by WABetaInfo (link). Throttling will prevent you from forwarding a message that has already been forwarded to you to more than one group. This limitation will not affect messages you have created yourself, only those previously forwarded to you. WABetaInfo does not specify whether they can be forwarded to individual contacts, as the news only indicates the limitation of forwarding to newsgroups.
WhatsApp started with these limitations a long time ago, and it is no longer possible to forward messages that have been detected as having been forwarded multiple times to more than five groups. Now this new measure is advancing within the limits, with the aim of avoiding misinformation and spam, but the effectiveness of which raises many doubts.
