In order to limit the damage, the popular chat app is introducing a new limit on forwarding messages: You can now only do that to one chat at a time. That limit kicks in once the message has been forwarded more than five times in total. Just to explain this a bit further, WhatsApp can’t read the content your messages, but through the metadata, it can count the number of times a particular message has been forwarded. In a blog post, the chat app said that it saw the number of forwards shoot up in the past couple of days, and that can lead to the spread of misinformation: In 2018, WhatsApp began labeling forward messages, and introducing a limit on the number of people you can send that message to in one go. In India, the limit was five people at a time at the launch, which was rolled out worldwide later. The company said this change brought down forwards by 25 percent at that time. The Facebook-owned service, with more than 2 billion users, is also testing reverse image search and text search to curb fake news on its platform.
