Matti Robinson
8 Apr 2020 12:16
All sorts of information and social media platforms are currently struggling with misinformation as informing the public about COVID-19 and related issues has become invaluable.
YouTube has announced that it is removing conspiracy content that links 5G cell towers to coronavirus due to people destroying 5G equipment. WhatsApp has now followed suit and come out with some unexpected protocols themselves, The Guardian reports.
The world's leading messaging platform, with more than a billion users around the world, is trying to restrict the sharing of harmful and false information about COVID-19.
While WhatsApp isn't going to ban any type of specific content, like in the case of YouTube, if you receive a message that has been shared over 5 times, you can only forward it to one chat room at a time. Previously WhatsApp allowed messages to be forwarded to up to three chats at a time.
This doesn't exactly disallow you to share false information but it does make mass sharing a little more difficult, and probably dissuades people from spreading fake news – and perhaps other content too.