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In an Attempt To Tackle Spread of Fake News, Facebook's WhatsApp Puts Limit on Message Forwarding (theguardian.com)
WhatsApp users will be blocked from forwarding messages to more than five individuals or groups under new rules the messaging service is rolling out worldwide to fight the spread of misinformation. The company's vice-president for policy and communications, Victoria Grand, announced the policy at an event in Jakarta on Monday. The five-recipient limit was initially put in place in India last July. A larger limit, of 20 recipients, was put in place globally. WhatsApp said at the time the limits would "help keep WhatsApp the way it was designed to be: a private messaging app." Carl Woog, the head of communications at WhatsApp, which recently reportedly surpassed parent company Facebook's app in usage recently, said, "We settled on five because we believe this is a reasonable number to reach close friends while helping prevent abuse."
No, it doesn't. Nor would it limit the ability to manually spread fake news either.
Just yesterday I shared on WhatsApp a Facebook post with pictures of some wicked-ass PC modding. I shared it with 8 people, by copy/pasting the URL to the Facebook entry. You will be able to do that in the future as well.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Spread of Fake News is a direct result of death of journalism. If Facebook was serious about tackling this problem they would find a way to revenue share with journalists.
Bash Fox News just 3 days out from CNN, MSNBC, CNN, NBC, ABC, Buzz Feed, NYT, WaPo, and on and on all running with a story from BuzzFeed that sounded false, with unnamed sources and no ability to check if story is true. It was Fake News, but if it was true it "might" have lead to Trump being removed from office so that was more important than verifying the story.
Yea, Fox News is the big problem here.
If news, fake or true, can only be forwarded a fixed number of times, then people will re-describe the news in their own words. Introducing inaccuracies. It's like the game where the first person in a circle whispers a secret to the next person, it is repeated all the way around the circle, and then when the first person is told it, s/he describes how the story changed through being repeated (not retweeted).
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I dont't trust facebook. If facebook has friends, I probably don't trust them either.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!