WhatsApp has announced that it will be limiting group messages to only five recipients per message, in its efforts to “fight the spread of misinformation,” as reported by The Guardian. Victoria Grand, the company’s vice-president for policy and communications, first announced the new policy update at an event in Jakarta, Indonesia on Monday.
It’s been half a year since WhatsApp first rolled out this policy update to its users in India. Since July 2018, Indian users have been limited to sending messages to just 5 individuals at a time, while the rest of the world was limited to 20 recipients.
At the time, WhatsApp had said that the limits “would help keep WhatsApp the way it was designed to be: a private messaging app.” Meanwhile, head of communications Carl Wong told The Guardian that they eventually settled on five recipients since they believe that “this is a reasonable number to reach close friends while helping prevent abuse.”
India is now WhatsApp’s largest market, with over 200 million users monthly. However, a recent slew of lynchings reaching over 30 individual cases urged the messaging company to put the limits in place, after rumors saying that messages sent on WhatsApp caused the incidents were spread across the country.
WhatsApp also removed the quick-forward button that could easily forward images, video, and audio files to other people. According to the company, these two actions alone “reduced forwarding by 25% globally and more than that in India, which had one of the highest forwarding rates in the world.”
Some have also called on Facebook to do the same thing, asking the social media company to disallow sending messages to hundreds of recipients at once. Facebook has yet to comment on the issue.
