WhatsApp limits message forwarding in bid to tackle spread of misinformation | Hacker News Reader

WhatsApp limits message forwarding in bid to tackle spread of misinformation

cbc.ca

13 pointscolinprince20 comments

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18962992.

Why do they support forwarding anyway? Has there ever been a useful mass foward on a social media platform?

Because it's a useful feature. Don't forget that WhatsApp isn't designed much as a social media platform as a utility.

I use it all the time. For example, some parent from school sends me a message if their kid can play with my son tomorrow. I forward it to my wife so that she's in the loop. Super handy.

My sister sends me a nice photo of my kids. I forward it to the in-laws' family group (who live far away). They love getting pictures of their grandchildren. Super handy.

I suspect that it's stuff like this that the feature was designed for. I think it's hard for UX designers to imagine that there are millions of people who will believe anything they're sent and who will forward it to everybody. And that it's somehow the app's fault if people do it.

I mean, I'm no big fan of Facebook Inc, but where were the outraged news paper articles when people forwarded extremist nonsense, scams and viruses to their entire email contact list? Why didn't they demand action from, eh, whoever designed SMTP, immediately?

WhatsApp has no fancy engagement-maximizing algorithms that we can get angry at. It's really just texting with groups and mixed media. Forward something to 100 people, 100 phones are going to buzz.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand that people in the US don't use WhatsApp because texting is free. Do people in America get angry at telcos when people send violence inducing bullshit text messages to each other?

100% agree

What do we do when rumors need to be quickly corrected?

Or when some other imporant true news (natural disaster?) needs to be forwarded?

more shares/forwards = more "engagement"

How is that supposed to help with anything? It'll just take a bit longer to forward a message to all your friends, that's all.

Adding a bit of friction reduces the number of people motivated enough to overcome it.

We're talking about people willing to kill. It seems obvious to me that these are the kind of people that are motivated enough to tap on their phone 10 more times.

People willing to kill is a small subset of people willing to forward rumors. Deliberate friction can indeed be useful.

Only a minority are willing to kill. The rest just lazily contribute to spreading false rumors. If you stop the lazy ones, you may stop the rumor from going viral and reaching the killers.

This change makes both fake news and true news hard to spread.

I think this article may provide some context :

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-de...

Of course it doesn't help. Just shows local governments that they are trying all they can to stop spread of fake news

Still doesn't help in the case when you are a member of groups with a lot of people. They should limit it as one group or 5 individuals. It is restrictive but I consider most forwards as spam as it is.

May help with general spam. I think regulating groups would be a much better idea:

    Possible limit of messages per day/hour/minute
    Possible limit to certain members as "viewers"/"spectators"-only
    Possible threading (otherwise responses about a certain information are just buried / mixed)

"I am sorry but the message you are trying to send has been deemed a violation of our ToS and can not be sent."

Yeah I don't think people realize that this is also a form of censorship. I am sure countries like Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia will be pleased.

Also wary of making companies responsible for solving social issues.

Meanwhile, Facebook, WhatsApp's parent company, happily spreading crypto currency scam with their ad network

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