In a Bid To Curtail Spread of Misinformation, Facebook's WhatsApp Now Tells Users When a Message Has Been Forwarded (hindustantimes.com)

In a bid to fight spread of misinformation on its platform, Facebook-owned WhatsApp announced on Tuesday that it is launching a new feature globally that will highlight when a message has been forwarded versus composed by the sender. At the centre of the issue is high-volume sharing of misleading and false information, often arching political and religious sentiments, that is tricking a significant number of WhatsApp users. (WhatsApp is used by more than a billion users worldwide.) From a report: From now on, WhatsApp will put a "forwarded" label on these messages. "This extra context will help make one-on-one and group chats easier to follow. It will also help you determine if your friend or relative wrote the message they sent or if it came from someone else," the company said in a note. "WhatsApp cares deeply about your safety. We encourage you to think before sharing forwarded messages. As a reminder, you can report spam or block a contact in one tap and always reach out to WhatsApp directly for help," it added. To see this new forwarded label, users are required to have the newest supported version of WhatsApp on their phones. Additionally, this week the company relaunched a campaign in India as part of which it is running full-page ads on several newspapers in the country to create awareness about the issue.

Comments

Slippery Slope to Total Censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just a step in the direction of making us think that it is the big mega-corporation's job to censor what what we read.

Stop using anything from Facebook, please. Make them a small corporation again. Let them thrive in China where censorship will help them make money. But get them the heck out of my free United States democracy. They are dangerous.

Re:Slippery Slope to Total Censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

Overreact much?

This is Facebook finally, finally, deciding to add a snippet of highly relevant and useful metadata to some posts. Metadata that most every other service, including Twitter, has added routinely from the get-go.

Re:Slippery Slope to Total Censorship

[Falos]

I'm all for people abandoning facebook, especially the type in question (ie parrots inside echochambers).

I'm aware that censorship is a broadly-applicable word. It applies even to private platforms muting "hatespeech". Legal censorship is a thing. You can censor whatever you want, you don't even have to adhere to any concrete standards, you can do fuckall. That tends to contradict the noble posturing usually found nearby, however.

Anyway I'll happily swing the word around. But it doesn't belong here. This is a fucking FW tag. Nothing removed or prevented.

FW:FWD:FW:RE:FW:funny read to the end!! isn't censored. Though it probably will be if you post it anywhere intelligent.

Re:Slippery Slope to Total Censorship

[AmiMoJo]

Is the "Fw:" suffix added to email a form of censorship? Did it lead to greater censorship?

Not really.

[Gravis Zero]

This is just a step in the direction of making us think that it is the big mega-corporation's job to censor what what we read.

Actually, It's one mega-corp trying to stop efforts from people who are deliberately misinforming you on their platform. They have no control of information you get elsewhere.

Let them thrive in China where censorship will help them make money. But get them the heck out of my free United States democracy. They are dangerous.

What's more dangerous is people that get their information from the internet without checking the credibility of the source. Facebook is full of these kind of people and they are doing real damage to our democracies.

Stop using anything from Facebook

I agree, social media has done far more harm to the world than good.

Re:Not really.

[Scroatzilla]

There is one big problem with your argument: The notion of "credibility" might *seem* objective. However, there is a little cottage industry ("fact checking") that *asserts* credibility while pushing misleading or false information (e.g. Snopes).
Social media is such a new and powerful paradigm shift in human communication that the knee-jerk reaction by well meaning folks to "stop false information" is understandable, but also extremely naive. Of course the algorithm and/or human beings will inevitably consider > to be false and the source of the > to be non-credible.
So, the only *free* thing to do is let information flow, allow people to decide for themselves, and allow things to happen as they happen. The only "destruction" of democracy that I see is that > are losing their ability to shape public opinion because human beings are able to share information more quickly and easily with each other.
I presume (hope?) that, if non-censorship prevails, we'll have a nice average of really really stupid and really really intelligent people who steer us approximately toward the improvement of humanity. My hope for the immediate future is that we all stop fanning the flames of far-left and far-right voices.

WhatsApp Flags Forwarded Messages

[grep -v '.*' *]

highlight when a message has been forwarded versus composed by the sender

So I suppose it'll also tag a copy/paste sequence directly from another message? That's just as hard (easy) as forwarding. (Actually, it's ever-so-slightly harder, but not really.)

What if I dictate it verbally? (if nothing else, split screen or 2nd screen.)

What if I paraphrase it?

So all they're actually doing is highlighting the FORWARD indicator. Like that's going to stop anyone from forwarding the message to start with? I really don't get this. (I really don't get Facebook / Twitter either, but that's another matter and just me.)