WhatsApp is probably the most widely used social media platform in India. People, mostly the older generation, might not be so well-versed with Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, but everybody knows WhatsApp. We use it more for sending useless forwards than actual communication, but that’s fine.
Remember the time when Indians constituted for 20 billion WhatsApp messages that were sent out on NYE? Well, we’ve made it to the news again.
Turns out, that those various, annoying ‘Family’ groups and multiple other groups which are made for no apparent reason but we are forced to be a part of, is affecting not just us, but the internet in general.
As per a report by The Wall Street Journal, the internet is filling up faster each day because of the billions of ‘good morning’ messages people send to their friends, family and strangers on WhatsApp every day.
Pinterest, the picture platform, saw an incredible increase in the number of downloads by Indians after it introduced a category of pictures with quotes on it. Moreover, there has been a 10-fold increase in the number of ‘good morning images’ search on Google over the last 5 years.
People newly learning to use the internet begin the ritual before sunrise and the number of pictures sent continues to increase gradually by 8 a.m. About a million messages are shared by people across the country.
Not only is it filling up the internet, but these good-morning forwards are a major reason for people’s phone storage filling up faster than for people elsewhere.
The issue became so widespread that Google introduced a solution in the form an application. Files Go by Google, introduced in New Delhi in December, provides a feature to delete all ‘good morning’ images from the phone.
“The company used its giant image database and artificial-intelligence tools to train the app to weed out good-morning messages.”
First, we had the WhatsApp servers to crash, now we have Google making special apps to help us clear our phone’s storage of all the useless good morning texts. Indians are definitely going to change the world, I’m telling you.
