Imposing Limits Globally: WhatsApp Restricts Users to Forwarding a Message to Only 5 Chats at a Time

In a bid to clampdown on the spread of fake news, messaging platform WhatsApp to impose stricter limits on how widely its users can share messages, CNN Business reported.

“The forward limit significantly reduced forwarded messages around the world,” the company said in a statement.

“We’ll continue to listen to user feedback about their experience, and over time, look for new ways of addressing viral content,” the company added.

The development came to the foreon 21^st of January.

The previous limit of forwarding a message outside India was 20, which will be restrictedto only five chats at a time, the report said.

The messaging platform first imposed the five-chat limit in India in July last year after viral hoax messages resulted in a series of mob lynchings. The lynchings placed WhatsApp at the center of India’s fake news debate. As a result, the authoritiesinthe countrydemanded the platform to push more to stop the spread of misinformation.

According to the report, a user could still share a forwarded message with up to 1,280 people and the company limits the number of people in a single chat to 256.

WhatsApp has over 200 million active users in India with a total of 1.5 billion in the world. The platform sees 60 billion messages sent per day.