Towards the end of last month, WhatsApp announced a feature that should have been standard since the beginning: labelling forwarded messages. We get tons of messages from our friends every day and you might see the need to share such content to other people and that is where the forward button comes in handy.
With this change, all forwarded messages will be labelled so that the recipient knows that the message is not from the sender.
Well WhatsApp is now making changes to its forwarded messages policy where they announced that they are testing limiting forwarding messages in India. Apparently, India is the market where people forward content the most compared to other countries. WhatsApp is even testing an even lower limit of 5 chats at once. In addition, WhatsApp will remove the quick forward button which
This is WhatsApp response due to the false rumours that apparently went viral on the platform and led to violence. WhatsApp is big in India, over 250 million Indians use WhatsApp which is a huge percentage of the total (over 1.5 billion).
Forwarded messages can go insanely viral on WhatsApp and the forward button is used extensively when sharing such content on private chats and groups. This is the reason why WhatsApp decided to start labelling messages as forwarded and with the new test in India, this could determine whether everyone will be limited in forwarding messages.
“We believe that these changes-which we’ll continue to evaluate- will help keep WhatsApp the way it was designed to be: a private messaging app,” WhatsApp said in the blogpost.
