In order to help control the spread of misinformation by internet users, Whatsapp has put up a policy on 21st of April 2020 in order to control viral misinformation.
Whatsapp spokesman today said: “Since putting into place this new limit globally, there has been a 70% reduction in the number of highly forwarded messages sent on Whatsapp. This change is helping keep WhatsApp a private and personal conversations.”
The platform being known for messages of private, personal and group conversations, and used by many people in different parts of the world, tracking the spread of misinformation would be a difficult task across the globe that’s why this new policy is put forward. So, now, two arrows are created when you forward a particular message to different people and once that shows, you can only but forward the message once at a time no more to different persons at the same time.
The messages are allowed irrespective of the content of the messages because Whatsapp admitted that not all messages that go viral are bad and if you restrict one to just sending five messages a day or to a specific number of persons, it will affect the good messages that need to go viral.
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That was a kudos to the management of WhatsApp to try to check on the spread of messages. It showed that the management is a responsible one because it is only a responsible administration that will make effort to see that their product is a good one, not only a good one at it is, but also to see that no harm comes to people or the general public from their products. This singular action of them has gone a very long way to show their concern for the information people access through their app. Like I said earlier, it’s a kudos to them
There is need also for them to go further to find more ways to help to stop the dissemination of wrong or fake news. They can also look into the possibilities of one who hasn’t another person’s contact not sending messages to that person as it is the case of some other publication platform. Such also will help to limit the spread and manufacture of fake news. When that is done, those who do not have other peoples contacts and phone numbers will definitely be handicapped to spread the fake news or rumours as if they are authentic news. More grease to their elbows.
In addition to the aforementioned, the management of Whatsapp can also develop an app or a system which checks plagiarism or sharing of information which doesn’t come from a person directly. That is to say that such an app would make sure that one can send to people only what you yourself generated through research, through hard work or can allow such when the source is quoted or linked. By so doing, the spread of fake news can also be curtailed possibly, people who do the business of sharing fake news can also be caught and possibly sanctioned to forestall spreading of fake news.
