Social media platforms are a criticized for harboring fake news with giants like Facebook and Twitter going extra miles to pump these out of their popular platforms. The fake news debacles has been used as a scapegoat to point that our own government expressed interest in taxing all OTT services over what it dubbed as fake news and other national and social values.
Well, with the bad PR blowing through Whatsapp’s parent company Facebook, the IM giant has also joined the race with a new feature that can now warn you about any spam or dangerous links sent via individual and group chats.
According to a report by WABetaInfo, a Whatsapp BETA testers forum, the feature will allow users to detect if a received link has some suspicious embedded content with a pop-up warning to the recipients before opening the received link.
Availability of Whatsapp’s new suspicious links feature
In a snippet shared by WABetaInfo, all suspicious received links are marked with a Red strip within a sent message reading; Suspicious Link. However, the feature will be available in Whatsapp’s next version which is currently available to Beta testers only from the Google play store. Henceforth, its bad news for online fraudsters spreading the “Earn free money online here” click baits and good news for the loyal OTT taxed complaints.
In 2018, over 1.5 billion people used Whatsapp on a monthly basis as per the previous year. How better to keep these users coming back than removing the alarms that can make them flee?
