WhatsApp has been doing a lot to stop itself from being the festering grounds of fake news. Among them were severely limiting the number of simultaneous forwards you can have for a message, to actually labelling overshared messages. Now the messaging app is trying something new, and that is letting you search messages online with a tap.
Messages that have been frequently forwarded will get a magnifying glass icon next to them. Tapping this icon will then have the app search the message on Google. From there, hopefully you get results of a fact-check on the message you received. WhastApp claims that the company will not see the message itself in the process.
It’s an important addition to the messaging app. This basically simplifies the process down of fact-checking down to a single tap. Which is quite possible, depending on the simplicity of the message being fact-checked. Though it is possible that this feature may struggle to deal with more convoluted conspiracy theories.
On its blog post, WhatsApp says that it will be rolling out this feature in Brazil, Italy, Ireland, Mexico, Spain, the UK and the US. The company will likely enable the feature in other markets if this pilot goes well.
(Source: WhatsApp)
