Byco denies the WhatsApp rumour mill

If the year 2020 has taught us one thing, it is that misinformation has to be the greatest threat to societies around the world. Witness the flurry of ‘fake news’ circulating on Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp. The news, and its consequences, range from the truly random (No, Khala jaan, ginger does cure Covid-19), to the deeply damaging (see: the entirety of the Trump presidency).

The platform WhatsApp faces a particular challenge, since its messages are encrypted, and therefore cannot be policed in the same way Facebook and Twitter can be. WhatsApp has tried to fix the problem of misinformation by reducing the amount of times one can forward a message: in 2018 users could forward a message at once to 250 groups, which was reduced to five in 2019, and then one in 2020. 

Still, WhatsApp forwards ca