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Things You Should Know About WhatsApp's New Security Feature To Label Fake News

Aakriti Bansal Jul 12, 2018

After the fake news related to the death of 31 people in 10 states over the past one year and child lifting was spread via Whatsapp, it triggered a lot of chaos and panic among the public. Recently, the Ministry of Electronics and IT had issued warning letters to Whatsapp to control the spread of fake news. On Tuesday (11 July 2018) Whatsapp launched its “Forward Label” in India to combat this problem. Below are the 5 things you need to know regarding the fight of Whatsapp against the spread of fake news.

The new security feature against the spread of fake news will allow the user to differentiate between the forwarded news and the messages that whether they are originally written by their friends or relatives or if it originally came from the genuine source.
This new feature will lead to a better quality in one-on-one and group chats. The users will now find it easier to follow their chats. The existing users have to update their Whatsapp to enjoy this new feature.
Use of new machine learning techniques has been launched by Whatsapp in order to detect the false content. The company claimed it to be a testing method to identify the fake content. Moreover, they have started an exercise with academic in order to dig out the root procedure of how this fake content is spread across the country.
For a better control on group chats, Whatsapp has launched “Admins Only” which will enable the admin of the group to control and restrict any unwanted or fake message from other participants. This will help in a synchronised flow of information.
They have also published full-page advertisements in national dailies for the fight against the false information.

Apart from India, Whatsapp with 200 million users is planning to act globally against the spread of fake news on social media network owned by Facebook. Currently, the company will translate and publish the same advertisement in 9 different Indian states in their language.