In the last few hours there has been a lot of controversy with WhatsApp due to certain allegations of political parties that have accused that the messaging application would be censoring the users.
Facebook has had to make an official statement clarifying the situation from your past actions, indicating that they are making during the crisis of the coronavirus and the reasons that exist behind each one of their movements. What does WhatsApp?
The censorship of WhatsApp is not real: so says Facebook all the controversy
The greatest indictment of WhatsApp of censorship is in the new limit forwarding of messages, messages that once they have been forwarded more than 5 times only you will be able to forward them individually to the chats.
What is the goal? although you can forward messages all you want, having to forward them one-by-one causes messages to have a lower spread (according to WhatsApp, these days have been reduced by 25% globally).
Bot official of the Government of Spain for the coronavirus.
What reasons might someone have for believing that a message is being censored? Only the forwarded messages to many users simultaneously suffer from this limitation. Typically messages are limited to tend to be those that involve controversy (because your new hair cut is not going to forward no more than 5 people). “If some messages are limited and others do not is that we should be spying on you and censoring!
The explanation of WhatsApp: Once a message has been shared 5 times now, only it will be possible to forward the message to other chat one-on-one. This limit is applied automatically and does not save any relation with the content of the message -that WhatsApp nor sees, nor moderated, nor censored because all of the calls and messages of WhatsApp are protected with an encryption of end-to-end. The encryption of end-to-end means that only you and the person to whom you’re writing, you can see the content of your messages, and no one else – not even WhatsApp. The limit of automatic forwarding is applied systematically throughout the world and has no relationship with the verification of information in WhatsApp or in Facebook.
The new limit global forwarding was implemented by WhatsApp to keep the service personal and private, and to reduce the spread of viral messaging, with the goal of keeping our users safe. Is not related in any way with the organizations verification or with the ‘censorship’, and any assertion to the contrary is 100% false.
Our explanation: Block a message that is viral nature it is perfectly feasible without knowing the contents of the same. And how is it possible?
The first thing that has to be taken into account that a message is not as basic as a user can imagine, and brings a lot more complexity than you might expect. A message will normally be composed by the content (encrypted) and an encryption key that makes that only the sender and receiver can access the message. Within the message is usually going to be more information, such as the time of submission and in this case, the times it has been forwarded (in the case of WhatsApp, only the company knows exactly the properties of your messages, and this is a hypothetical situation).
This movement of WhatsApp shows that the company if it has the power to prevent the spread of messages of viral naturebut it is not sufficient evidence to demonstrate that the company is censoring explicitly messages of a certain content
If you have interest in knowing the official announcement of WhatsApp to read it, analyze it or simply forward it to your friends so that they are informed with the official sources, you can access it from here.
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