WhatsApp’s new restriction on forwards to group chats

Facebook-owned social media messaging app WhatsApp has been updating its features constantly. WhatsApp is well-known for its ease to forward a message. People can forward a message, photo or video to others and share it with them.

Initially, there was no restriction on the forwards and the number of people who receive them. But, to stop sending bulk messages and prevent spam, it restricted the number of people who can receive the message to five individuals at a time by a forward.

One can forward a message to a maximum of five people at a time with this limit. Besides, the messages shared by many people would be labelled as ‘frequently forwarded’. These messages also have the symbol of double arrows. They cannot be forwarded to more than one chat at a time.

Now, the company is testing a new feature related to forward messages. It wants to restrict forwarding messages to only one group chat at a time to prevent the spread of fake news to some extent. At present, it is in the beta testing phase. If the tests are successful, you will be able to forward a message to only one group chat at a time. The company says that the new feature will be available soon for everyone.

If you want to send it to another group, you need to select it again and forward it. So, you won’t be able to send messages that have a forward label to multiple group chats at a time. 

In addition to that, WhatsApp also rolled out a global voice note player for Android users. So far, the feature was available to Android users who enrolled in the beta programme. Now, it wants to expand the feature to more users.

The global voice note player enables users to listen to a voice note even after users leave the conversation. In other words, they can listen to the voice note even though they are using another app. However, WhatsApp should run in the background. So, there is no need to stay on a chat to listen to a voice note with this new feature.

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Image Reference: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/whatsapp-communication-smartphone-1357489/