WhatsApp says that highly-forwarded messages have plunged since it introduced new rules.

Earlier this month, in a major change, the company announced that it would prohibit people sending on "highly-forwarded" messages in an attempt to stop the spread of viral posts.

The new rules mean that if a message has already been sent on in bulk, users have to go to extra effort to forward it on more. If a message has been forwarded enough to get a "highly-forwarded" tag, users can only send it on to one person at a time, rather than five.

Now the company says those new rules have worked, and the number of such messages being forwarded on has dropped 70 per cent since the new features were introduced.

The update was intended partly to address the wide spread of misinformation, and arrived as WhatsApp and other social networks aimed to deal with an influx of false stories and rumours related to the coronavirus pandemic.

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WhatsApp had specifically aimed to cut down on viral messages with the new rules, in contrast to other social networks, which generally encourage users to try and have their posts spread as widely as possible.

Receiving a host of mass forwarded messages can feel "overwhelming" as well as helping spread misinformation, it said when the new rules went into place.

"We believe it’s important to slow the spread of these messages down to keep WhatsApp a place for personal conversation," it wrote in a blog post alongside the announcement.

The new feature followed an update introduced in January 2019, which added a set of arrows to any message that had been forwarded on enough times, with a similar aim of "constraining virality".