Messages forwarded by other users are now visibly labelled as such, WhatsApp has announced. — dpa
Since the start of last year, as many as 33 people have been killed in mob justice attacks in India, according to non-profit journalism initiative IndiaSpend.
The messenger service WhatsApp has increasingly come under fire over its role in facilitating the violence, as police say the lynchings have been sparked by rumours – shared by message – that child kidnappers are on the prowl.
It's believed that WhatsApp's forwarding function has allowed such reports of child abductions to rapidly spread across the platform's large user network in India.
After an advertising campaign in Indian newspapers and a new feature alerting users to forwarded messages, the service is now introducing a hard limit on forwarding for all users around the world.
WhatsApp announced it is scaling back its function that has allowed users to forward a message to large numbers of contacts.
"In India – where people forward more messages, photos, and videos than any other country in the world – we'll also test a lower limit of 5 chats at once and we'll remove the quick forward button next to media messages," the company said on July 19.
The modifications to WhatsApp's user interface come amid sharp criticism from India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
"It is regretted that the enormity of the challenge and the rampant abuse happening in the country leading to repeated commissioning of crimes pursuant to rampant circulation of irresponsible messages in large volumes on their platform have not been addressed adequately by Whatsapp," the ministry said.
In a statement the ministry said WhatsApp "cannot evade responsibility and accountability" and threatened legal action against the company if it remained "mute spectators".
Earlier in July, the Facebook subsidiary announced that messages forwarded by other users were going to be visibly labelled as such.
By highlighting messages that have been forwarded, WhatsApp wants to make it easier for users to tell if a message was written by the person sending it or if it originally came from someone else.
In a July advertisement in key Indian newspapers, the messaging platform urged Indians to think twice before sharing messages that contain spelling mistakes or they made the reader angry or afraid.
"Together We Can Fight False Information," was the title of the WhatsApp advertisement.
Other tips to spot fake news included: the need to double-check facts; check who wrote the original message; check elsewhere if stories seem hard to believe; and to check online where a photo had come from. — dpa
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