Whatsapp steps up the fight against the spread of fake news and drastically changes a function. You need to know.
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Whatsapp is constantly getting new features
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Whatsapp is planning to introduce a restriction on forwarding already forwarded messages soon. As WABetaInfo reports, the change has already been spotted in the new Whatsapp beta for Android 2.22.7.1. In the next few days, this change will also be activated for all Whatsapp users, they say.
The limitation means that a Whatsapp message that has already been forwarded (which is also marked accordingly by Whatsapp with a double arrow and the note “Forwarded”) may only be forwarded by the recipient to one group chat at a time. The user will be informed accordingly with the following warning when attempting to forward the message:
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Whatsapp will prevent messages that have already been forwarded from being forwarded
© WABetaInfo
So if the user wants to forward a received forwarded Whatsapp message to more than one group chat, he must do this separately for each individual group chat.
Spreading fake news is made more difficult
Whatsapp had already announced in a blog post in April 2020 that it wanted to make the spread of misinformation more difficult and had taken measures to do so, including a fact check, which we reported on here.
One of the original plans was to limit message forwarding to a maximum of four times. However, since the messages are now protected by end-to-end encryption, Whatsapp cannot know whether and how many times a message will be forwarded. That should now be the reason why Whatsapp introduces the new restriction.
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