The most used messaging application in Spain and many other countries around the world is going to undergo a new change to prevent the spread of false news. Soon you will only be able to forward a message that has been sent to you to a single group every time.
The spread of hoaxes and fake news is an obvious problem in social networks these days. Many people get information on a daily basis only using platforms like Facebook or Twitter where fake news is rampant, and they pay more attention to the messages they receive on WhatsApp than to what their common sense tells them. In a new attempt to reduce the use of this messaging application for the spread of false news, WhatsApp is going to limit the forwarding of messages to make their mass dissemination more complicated.
This new function of message forwarding has already been active in some users of the WhatsApp for Android Beta for weeks, and now is starting to appear in the WhatsApp for iOS Beta as reported by WABetaInfo (link). The limitation will prevent you from forwarding a message that has previously been forwarded to you, to more than one group. This limitation will not affect messages that you have created yourself, only those that have been previously forwarded to you. WABetaInfo does not clarify if they can be forwarded to individual contacts, since the news only indicates limitation of forwarding to chat groups.
WhatsApp started with these limitations a long time ago, and it is no longer possible to forward messages that have been detected to have been forwarded many times to more than five groups. Now this new measure advances in the limitations, in an attempt to avoid disinformation and spam, but of which there are many doubts about its effectiveness.
