California: Cybersecurity and false news and information experts say restricting the WhatsApp's forwarding options has reduced the spread of fake news, false reports and rumors, but more action is needed.
WhatsApp voluntarily reduced the option of sending a message to 20 people in January this year, limiting it to only 5 people. Earlier, WhatsApp users could send a message to 256 people, which was restricted to 20 and then to a further 5.
In Brazil and India, the WhatsApp was widely used to influence elections. Subsequently, there were several allegations of helping rumors on Facebook and Twitter as well as on WhatsApp itself.
In response, WhatsApp previously reduced the 256 option to 20 and now a message can only be sent to 5 different people at a time. But cyber experts say WhatsApp messaging is more people-centered than Twitter-Trend and Facebook, which is very difficult to capture.
In this regard, MIT student Karan Gormela, who hails from India, said that the process of limiting messages from the WhatsApp has been a bit effective, but more work is needed. According to Kiran, the depth and usefulness of the WhatsApp is difficult to estimate.
For this, they have accessed tens of thousands of people and political parties and groups in Brazil, India and Indonesia. Thereafter, six million messages exchanged in all three countries were reviewed.
He then created a network model and tested various options in a virtual environment or simulation, and set the limits for forwarding messages to them. This is how the spread of true or false information was reviewed. They found that limiting the message to only 5 people caused the messages to go viral. 80% of the messages died within two days, while 20% of the messages remained intact and kept moving.
Experts have suggested the WhatsApp "quarantine" as a way to directly restrict access to specific messages to specific people. But before that, the health of the message that goes viral must be reviewed and confirmed to be true or false.
0 Comments