The social media giant is facing its biggest battle of fighting against misinformation that is being spread rapidly across the platform on an everyday basis. But the steps that the company is taking rapidly to prevent unnecessary panic might soon get them their reputation back in the eyes of people.
According to the recent developments, as caught by the famous reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong, Facebook has tweaked its Messenger app by limiting the number of people you can forward a message to at a single time. This is done specifically to add frictions in the way users around the globe are spreading misinformation almost every other hour.
In a GIF shared by Jane, one can see the user trying to send a “test message” to a number of threads but as soon as she ticks of five people in her friend list, Facebook warns about the limit with a pop-up notification. Hence, that means even if a user wants to send a piece of misinformation to others, Facebook won’t allow him to forward it to more than 5 friends or groups now.
We're working hard to limit the spread of misinfo on our platforms, especially with #COVID19, and we’re exploring more options like testing stricter limits for how many chats you can fwd a message to at one time. This feature is still in development and not testing externally yet https://t.co/6ukn1TmSLi— Alexandru Voica (@alexvoica) March 22, 2020
Facebook has adopted this approach from Whatsapp as they first tried the technique of limiting the number of people you can forward a message to in everyone’s top favorite chatting app and eventually the experiment also resulted into a significant decline in misinformation being spread.
Coronavirus has put the health of millions around the world at risk and with that, the markets are also on their knees. This is the time when the world needs Facebook’s help and fortunately, the company is constantly delivering whatever is possible by collaborating with governments, emergency response organizations and small businesses, along with easing up the pressure for its employees and users as well.
While misinformation creates panic which can be more dangerous than the coronavirus itself for so many populations, let’s hope Facebook’s attempt to put a break to all the wrong messages work!
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