The Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp is indeed quite popular across the world, but lately the issues of spam and fake news had cast a shadow on its popularity. Now WhatsApp has come up with another great feature that will help you differentiate between fake news and real news.  To deal with that, WhatsApp will start carrying a tag above the message saying ‘forwarded’, which will help receiver understand if the message has been forwarded as received or has actually been typed out.

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However, it must be noted that the 'forwarded' tag appears only if a message has been actually forwarded using the ‘forward’ button when you highlight the received message. Simply copying the message and pasting it into another chat would not show the ‘forwarded’ tag. 

Nevertheless, the feature is indeed useful because copying and pasting a message can only be sent to one contact at a time, while forwards can be sent to multiple contacts in one go. Therefore, mass-forwarded messages, which deliberately disseminate fake information can be easily identified. 

As of now, this feature has only been launched as the beta version of WhatsApp for Android (Version 2.18.179), but will be rolled out for all devices soon.
 
Meanwhile, earlier in January, developers at Wabetainfo.com, a team of beta testers for Andriod, IoS, Windows and web applications had written in their blog that WhatsApp had been testing a feature to stop the spread of fake messages over the messaging app, reported the New Indian Express.

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All the fresh features from WhatsApp first make it to its beta versions before the full-fledged rollout. It is better to let advanced users experiment with new features before these are made available to the general users.

WhatsApp now has a monthly active user base of 200 million users.