A couple of days ago Whatsapp promised to release new features after 29 persons were killed in India due to the widespread circulation of fake news on the messaging platform.
Now the Facebook-owned company seems to be holding good on its words as a new feature has been spotted in Whatsapp – for fighting the spread of fake news and spamming of malicious or fake links on the platform.
This feature called “Suspicious Link Detection” was first spotted by WABetaInfo in the beta version 2.18.204 of WhatsApp for Android.
According to the blog post, it will help users in identifying suspicious links by automatically detecting whether the URL leads to a fake or malicious website and check its authenticity.
The app will immediately notify about a suspicious link by labeling it in red color which would indicate spamming. In case a user still decides to open the link, WhatsApp will again prompt a message alerting about the nature of the website and reconfirm if the user wants to proceed anyway.
WABetaInfo also claims that every time WhatsApp would analyze a link, it would do so locally without sending any data packet to its servers. Hence, the privacy of your messages would remain intact while keeping fake news sources at bay.
The Suspicious Link Detection feature is currently under development, and there is a word going around that this feature may also come with an ability to let users manually report a suspicious link.
However, there is no word from WhatsApp on when this update would be made official. So we will have to wait for a while before we could use this helpful feature.
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