Fake news has become a rampant problem and in an election year, such information can make or break the fortunes of a political party. And part of the fake news are images, spread through popular platforms like WhatsApp.
The Facebook-owned messaging app is aware of these issues, clearly, which is why they will soon let users verify the source of image from the web.
This is an upcoming feature, first spotted by the folks at WABetainfo, who’ve made it clear that the Search Image option wasn’t working for now.
WhatsApp is developing a new feature that allows to search an image on the web that you sent/received in your chats, says the post on WABetainfo
This feature will be very useful because it can help us to understand if a news is fake: when you receive an image, you can try to search it on the Web using this feature, so you can discover if it’s fake reading info on the Web related to that image.WABetaInfo
As mentioned in the blog post, WhatsApp will make use of the official Google APIs to find images that are similar or carry equal elements on the web.
Once you’ve uploaded the image from WhatsApp to Google, the messaging app will show the results of the search by opening it on the browser.
This feature could have a big impact in markets like India, where it caters to over 200 million active users. The app is available for devices across all price brackets, including the entry-level JioPhone.
The menace of fake news has also lead to people being killed after wrongful information was shared virally, angering different communities.
Similar to its decision to limit forwarding chats to five people and letting users decide if they want to join a group, the image search could work like a charm, if it works as advertised.
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