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NEW DELHI (WASHINGTON POST) – WhatsApp said Thursday (July 19) it is planning to limit message forwarding in India, where two dozen people have been killed this year in violent mobs fired by rumors spreading on the global messaging platform, and
The company said in a blogpost Thursday evening in the United States that it is launching a test to limit forwarding on WhatsApp in India, where people forward more messages and videos than anywhere else in the world.
The controls include a plan to limit the number of users that can be downloaded from the Internet.
For the global version of the application, the company will limit the number of forwards to 20 other groups. The move marks a major change to the architecture of an application that is more widely used for political communication by 1.5 billion people in the world in response to a request for more information.
" 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's spokesman Carl Woog wrote.
Earlier Thursday, India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology had warned What to do with effective solutions to stop mob violence – or face legal action.
The government said in a statement that the general feeling in the country is that "much more needs to be done by WhatsApp."
"When rumors and fake news get propagated by mischief mongers, the medium used for such propagation can not evade responsibility and accountability," the government wrote.
"If they remain mute spectators they are liable to be treated as abettors and thereafter face legal action."
Other countries around the world have also had a lot of problems with the epidemic in Brazil – but in India the fcc news is particularly pernicious because so many digitally naïve users are coming online for the first time. Many of the mobs attacked people they thought were children kidnappers because of rumors that had spread on WhatsApp.
Officials from the Menlo Park, California-based company are in India this week to meet with digital literacy organizations and civil society leaders to discuss The Society, Owned by Facebook, said the said, "The spate of violence, which was prompted by the number of people in India, according to the Indian government."
WhatsApp was used by a particular Indian political party – which it did not name – in a recent state election in Karnataka, saying that
Spokesmen for the two major national political parties – the governing Bharatiya Janata Party and the main opposition Indian National Co ngress – denied manipulating the app.
WhatsApp said that the use of the app in this ways violates its terms of service –
"We built WhatsApp as a private messaging app – a simple, secure and reliable way to communicate with friends and family. And we added added features, "Woog wrote.
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