Whatsapp is soon going to roll out a reverse search feature. This feature will let you search messages which are frequently forwarded.
Misinformation is a serious disease that affects one too many people in the world. Just like Google’s reverse image search, you will be able to search a message on the web to check if it has correct information or not.
Currently, WhatsApp considers messages that have been forwarded more than five times in a chain as frequently forwarded messages. Now you will see a magnifying glass button beside these messages which will direct you to any news related to that message on google.
These messages are also marked as double arrows with forwarded label on the top.
Well, because of WhatsApp‘s end-to-end encryption, the company can’t read your messages. So, you might have to go through multiple links on the web to determine if a said message is misinformative or not.
In a country like India where there are 400 million active users. This feature should have already been on WhatsApp. The amount of forwarded news in our country is huge. Daily we receive so many hoax messages. Due to such fake messages now people have started to doubt even legitimate messages. Forwarded messages just can’t be trusted straight away. They were used to be trusted once upon a time though.
The feature is available for users in Brazil, Italy, Ireland, Mexico, Spain, the UK, and the US for all versions of WhatsApp. Don’t know what is going on in the minds of people working behind this in WhatsApp. India should have been one of the first countries to get this.