WhatsApp for years has been and will always be the prevailing way people socially interconnect, discover and discuss news. For instance, this social media platform seems to be the cheapest and largely used by many people across the world.
“We’re imposing a
limit of five messages all over the world as of today,” Victoria Grand, vice
president for policy and communications at WhatsApp, said at an event in the
Indonesian capital last Monday.
The new policy has been agreed upon carefully after testing the impacts of this measure in this country for a period of 6 months. This measure is mainly meant to tackle the spread of misinformation on this platform and among users.
For the past years, users have been able to forward messages more than 20 messages in different groups and to different contacts. Fake news is spread so as to confuse the public, provoke violence, instill fear and also spread panic among the users. Henceforth, this has led to mob killings and child abduction in India (2018) and recently in Zimbabwe (2019) it has confused the public and promoted demonstrations.
False news through this Whatsapp platform has been dominant in Ukraine and in the Central Europe mostly. For instance, the users doctor videos which are then forwarded to many large groups and this mobilizes people to act violently.
The Facebook owned business (WhatsApp) will continue to accept user feedback about their experience so as to correct any errors that may need to be rectified during this policy implementation, and over time look for new ways of addressing viral content.
The new update started
rolling out last Monday (21st January 2019) and the update will be received by
Android users first, and then iOS users after.
