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Whatsapp Levels Up Privacy And News Sharing Ahead Of Elections

India is the biggest WhatsApp market in the world, with 200 million users. It is therefore that Whatsapp has been thinking of strengthening its hold in the Indian social media industry while still abiding by the Indian government along with its cyber laws and other policies.

New Delhi, India, April 4, 2019 —

In a welcome move, Whatsapp has rolled out few appreciative features in its latest update. Just a few days ahead of Lok Sabha elections, the social media platform has rolled out its fight against Fake News Sharing for political propaganda or personal motives.

Whatsapp has a customer base of over 1.5 billion users over 180 countries all over the world. It is by far the most popular messaging application in the world, with 0.2 billion more users than Facebook Messenger. The messaging platform Whatsapp has an active base of one billion daily users.

India is the biggest WhatsApp market in the world, with 200 million users. It is therefore that Whatsapp has been thinking of strengthening its hold in the Indian social media industry while still abiding by the Indian government along with its cyber laws and other policies.

Whatsapp Rolls Out Fact Check

Whatsapp has recently rolled out a fact check number +91-9643-000-888 in India to combat the spread of fake news over WhatsApp in bulk for the propaganda of misinformation.

WhatsApp owner Facebook Inc said it had deleted 712 accounts and 390 pages in India and Pakistan for “inauthentic behaviour”, saying many were linked to India’s opposition Congress party and others related to Pakistan’s military.

The new service, Whatsapp Checkpoint Tipline, can receive messages in the form of images and video as well as text in English and four regional languages, it added. Checkpoint is a research project commissioned by WhatsApp.

Whatsapp Working With Local Startup Proto

WhatsApp said in a statement it was working with local startup Proto to classify messages sent to the service by users as true, false, misleading or disputed. They are also building a database of such content to better understand misinformation.

“The goal of this project is to study the misinformation phenomenon at scale,” Proto’s founders Ritvvij Parrikh and Nasr ul Hadi said in a statement. “As more data flows in, we will be able to identify the most susceptible or affected issues, locations, languages, regions, and more.”

Privacy Against Groups In The Latest Update

In the beta mode update, the user can control who adds them into a group. The options are – No one, My Contacts, Anyone. It sure gives the users much control over their Whatsapp usage.

Apart from this, users can now reply privately to messages sent in a group. This adds to the privacy of a user, when someone may choose to not speak up in a group.

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