WhatsApp's New Limit Cuts Virality of 'Highly Forwarded' Messages by 70% (techcrunch.com) 15
WhatsApp's bid to cutting virality of messages circulating on its platform by introducing an additional limit earlier this month has already started to pay off. From a report: The Facebook -owned service said on Monday that spread of "highly forwarded" messages sent on WhatsApp had dropped by 70% globally in weeks after introducing a new restriction earlier this month. In one of the biggest changes to its core feature, WhatsApp said earlier this month that users on its platform can now send along frequently forwarded messages they receive to only one person or a group at a time, down from five. The restriction was rolled out globally to WhatsApp's 2 billion users on April 7.
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What a stupid idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's a great idea - let's take the most popular messaging platform on the planet, and then gut the core ability of users to send messages to whoever they want, whenever they want!
Way to leave an opening for a competing service...
Facebook's new motto: "Information wants to be not only monetized, but also chained and suppressed".
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Here's a great idea - let's take the most popular messaging platform on the planet, and then gut the core ability of users to send messages to whoever they want, whenever they want!
more accurately, let's limit that ability of users to spread mesages to just their friends and family, and not to everybody on the planet.
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Well hello to you too, comrade. You cut down the spread of a virus by limiting its options for spreading. When the virus is false information being spread by Russian, Chinese and North Korean bots, it's best to slow them down if you can't remove them entirely. Normal people will spread their information, true or false, at their normal rate. This will affect them very little.
Defense Production Act (Score:2)
In a time when most people's basic human rights to free assembly and free association have been "temporarily" abrogated, it is critical that the masses be able to communicate freely.
It seems WhatsApp is unwilling or unable to ensure reliable operation, in accordance with First Amendment principles, of its part of the telecommunications system. Therefore it may be necessary for President Trump to invoke the Defense Production Act. DPA allows removal of WhatsApp top management and their replacement with compe
Let's talk about the elephant (Score:5, Insightful)
How do they know a message is highly forwarded or not unless they have hacked WhatsApp to no longer be secure?
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No, but it's funny to watch Zuck's gang accidentally admit it.
one possible solution to your elephant problem (Score:1)
Record a one-way hash of the URL. Hopefully don't tie the hash to a particular account, only keep a global scoreboard.
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What URL, the one posted in the message? It's supposed to be end to end encrypted so that WhatsApp can't even tell what was sent, much less that it's a particular URL.
If the app is sending even a one way hash from the cleartext, it's leaking information outside of the encryption..
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The app's telemetry would need to do it before the message is encrypted. It wouldn't leave your device unencrypted. You leak worse information on routine things like certificates updates. It's not optimal, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it.
Sadly, I have a lot of experience with this kind of bullshit through a previous employer. At some point they decided that logging every keystroke was not a nice thing to do, but they didn't want to give up the user experience data sets so they anonymized them. (inst