Due to the recent incidents of Mob Lynching in India, WhatsApp has made it clear that it is in a planning stage to limit message forwarding. Two dozen people have been killed by violent mobs this year due to the fact that rumors were spread on the global messaging platform. Now it is instituting a new global limit over the forwarding feature around the world.
In a recent blog post on Thursday evening, the company said that in the United States it is launching a test to limit forwarding on its App in India for the reason that people forward more messages and videos when compared to anywhere in the world. The steps to control also include a plan to limit the total number of chats that users can forward to five in India and the removal of the “quick forward” button next to media messages.
As for the global version of the application, the company intends to limit the total number of forwards to not more than 20 other groups. The move is seen as a major step in changing the architecture of an application that is serving as a platform for political communication by about 1.5 billion people across the world. The steps being taken is in response to the public pressure and also the leaving away a service that has long been used to do as per the will.
“We believe that these changes – which we’ll continue to evaluate – will help keep WhatsApp the way it was designed to be: a private messaging app,” WhatsApp’s spokesman Carl Woog wrote.
The government of India under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology had warned the messaging company WhatsApp earlier Thursday to create some effective solutions to stop mob violence or to face legal action.
The government expressed in a statement that the country feels that there is a lot to be done and improved by WhatsApp.
“When rumors and fake news get propagated by mischief mongers, the medium used for such propagation cannot evade responsibility and accountability,” the government wrote. “If they remain, mute spectators, they are liable to be treated as abettors and thereafter face consequent legal action.”
There is some news from other countries too that have also grappled with the spread of fake news on the platform which includes a recent yellow fever disease in Brazil. But for India, it is somewhat different due to the fact many digitally naïve users are coming online for the first time thus giving ample opportunity for fake news spread. Due to the rumor spread on WhatsApp, many people assumed people to be child kidnappers on suspicion and attacked them.
The California-based company, Menlo Park, has sent its officials to India this week to hold meetings with digital literacy organizations and civil society leaders to exchange ideas to curb violence that has prompted demands for it to do something to control the spread of viral content on the app. The app is used by about 225 million people in India, as per the statistics provided by the Indian government.
WhatsApp is owned by Facebook and it said this week that it did an in-depth study regarding how the WhatsApp was used by a particular Indian political party in a recent state election in Karnataka. It did not elaborate the party name. The party used WhatsApp to the campaign by using operatives who formed dozens of WhatsApp groups, added telephone numbers and then utilized those groups to send messages intended to gain political mileage. Both the national parties of India, Bharatiya Janata Party and Indian National Congress denied using the app to promote themselves.
The ways applied by the political party violates terms of service of the company, said WhatsApp.
“We built WhatsApp as a private messaging app – a simple, secure and reliable way to communicate with friends and family. And as we’ve added new features, we’ve been careful to try and keep that feeling of intimacy which people say they love,” Woog wrote.
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