Whatsapp on Monday announced a worldwide reduction on the message forwarding feature's limit on its application.
Announcing the decision from Jakarta, Indonesia's capital city, the Whatsapp team put the capping at a maximum of 5 messages.
"We're imposing a limit of five messages all over the world as of today," Victoria Grand, vice president for policy and communications at WhatsApp was quoted by CNBC.
Besides, the social networking platform revealed that the decision has been reached to fight "misinformation and rumors".
Prior to the new directive, netizens could forward one message to up to 20 individuals or groups.
The decision is likely to have been informed by an unfortunate incident in India in July 2018 where the spread of rumors and fake information on social media led to killings and lynching attempts.
This incident saw the application limit the message forwarding feature in India; a move that has been expanded to cover the application's clients globally.
With nearly 1.5 billion users Whatsapp has held potent to spread fake news, manipulated photos, videos without context, and audio hoaxes, with no way to monitor their origin or full reach.
The management of the Facebook-owned subsidiary has been trying to find ways to curb the misuse of the instant messaging app following global concern.
According to Carl Woog, WhatsApp's head of communications, an update of the application will be rolled out beginning Monday for Android users in order to activate the new message forwarding limit.
An updated version for Apple's iOS users is then expected to be rolled out soon after.
