WhatsApp, the world’s most famous messaging client, has updated and introduced an interesting new feature. If you limit yourself to forwarding something made by others instead of writing a post or sending an original photo/video, the recipient discovers it in a moment. A novelty that has been announced by the Italian team of the app with a message on the official blog.
But how exactly does the new messaging management work?
From now on, when you take a received message, photo or video and forward it to another chat, a label “forwarded” automatically appears in the chat of the recipient. In this way, we can immediately understand if a certain post was written directly by the author or if it was simply forwarded to us from another chat.
Despite the reasons given by the Whatsapp team, the reasons are more transparency than security in the strict sense: it’s still nice to know if the people were in contact with really have an interest in communicating with us or simply forwarding messages, posts, photos and videos of others. In addition, the reliability of the message forwarded is also different: something product and sent by one of our contacts has a different value from a message simply “turned”, perhaps without verification. Given the mammoth proportions of WhatsApp, perhaps this will limit the proliferation of Fake News by stimulating people’s critical sense.
This feature is already available in the latest versions of the client for Android and iOS and, since it is a security measure, it will be activated by default and presumably not disabled.