If you are prone to receiving unwanted WhatsApp forwards, you have probably come across a message that declares, ‘If you touch the black point, your WhatsApp will hang’, with the said black point lower in the long text.
And sure enough, if you do touch it, your WhatsApp will momentarily stop working or just hang.
Now, don’t worry. It is not any kind of virus that your paranoid uncle has been warning you about. Sometimes you can just mess with a messaging client if you send symbols it doesn’t recognise.
According to YouTuber Tom Scott, When you convert the said text to HTML, you’ll find that there has been a repetition of the control character “&rlm:”.
Basically, you need to understand that some languages were written from right to left. Like anything in Arabic or the Hebrew script. So if you are writing some English, you are going from left to right but if you want to insert a Persian word in it, it will go from right to left, thus scrambling the alignment.
So WhatsApp uses a control character to tell the system that the alignment has changed from right to left. So the creator of this WhatsApp forward used so many of these control characters that it overwhelms your Android device.
This bug will most likely get fixed in a few days. So chill out. It’s a weekend and your paranoids uncle is wrong about the social media viruses.