In an attempt to eradicate the emergence of fake news, Whatsapp is globally limiting the number of individuals a user can forward messages to- five individuals. This update was announced by the company’s Vice President for Policy and Communications, Victoria Grand at an event in Jakarta, Indonesia yesterday.

“We’re imposing a limit of five messages all over the world as of today. The decision had been made to stop “misinformation and rumours,” Grand stated.

In recent times fake news has become one of the greatest threats to democracy and the world at large. So far different organisations have put in efforts to stop the spread of fake news. In November 2018, Andela, a global technology firm hosted the “Fighting Fake News” hackathon supported by BBC News in Kenya.

Whatsapp has a customer base of 1.5 billion active users. Before this update to the application, users could forward messages to 20 individuals or groups at once which means that messages could be sent out to thousands of people within a few clicks. This limit to 5 individuals would help reduce the number of individuals the information is sent to at once.

While this would not fully eradicate the spread of fake news, this would help reduce the amount of people the information is spread to before it is debunked. In July 2018, this measure was adopted in India following a series of mob lynchings that were caused by fake news.