With the advancement in technology forcing a lot of breaking news to be broadcast over social media including WhatsApp, fake news has become rampant globally. A lot of memes, challenges, and unverified content is run over facts and reality, and many viewers fall prey.
WhatsApp is developing a number of mechanisms to fight the spread of fake news across the platform, used by over 1.5 billion people. The app already limited the number of times you can forward a message to other people last January.
Now, according to WABetaInfo, there is a new feature in the pipeline that will allow you to search for an image that you sent or received in your chats to prove its authenticity.
The WhatsApp beta 2.19.73 update for Android is spotted to have a ‘Search image’ feature which will take a user to Google in order to search for similar images as the one which a user may have received in a WhatsApp chat.
The feature isn’t available yet, but shared screenshots prove that it is being tested for Android phones.
How will the Search Image feature work?
When you receive an image in a WhatsApp chat, you will be able to search it on the Web to discover if it’s fake or has real content on the Web related to it.
You will do this by selecting the image in question. Upon selection, look in the options available and select Search.
If you select Search image, WhatsApp will alert you that it will be uploaded to Google:
It is reported that it could make use of Google APIs to upload the searched image to Google from the WhatsApp chat. After uploading the image, your WhatsApp will open the browser to show the results.
