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."

Comments

News will turn into Gossip

[DickBreath]

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).