The European Consumer Organisation and the European Network of consumer authorities say WhatsApp has not explained the changes in plain and intelligible language in breach of EU consumer law.

Russia has in the past designated groups such as the Taliban and Islamic State as 'extremist' but later expanded this to the Jehovah's Witnesses and jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation.

Two days after Russia invaded Ukraine, an account on the Telegram messaging platform posing as President Volodymyr Zelensky urged his armed forces to surrender.

The new feature will be rolled out gradually, beginning with users who have the most recent version of WhatsApp on their phones.

Saiful Mahdi was imprisoned for three months over comments made in a WhatsApp messenger group chat among fellow academics, which criticised a hiring process for lecturers.

A major outage hitting all three platforms, which have billions of users, is rare though apps are regularly forced offline by technical problems.

A Taliban spokesman meanwhile criticises Facebook for blocking 'freedom of speech' in Afghanistan.

Facebook engineers say the new feature will allow WhatsApp to be used on phones and 'up to four other non-phone devices simultaneously – even if your phone battery is dead'.

The accused leaked information regarding the suspension of sport, physical activity classes and programmes for children and youth.

WhatsApp says rules that require tracing the origin of chats are the equivalent of keeping a 'fingerprint of every single message sent on the service'.

Users will get 'persistent' reminders about the policy and may lose some functionality if they fail to accept the new terms.

The California giant last month delayed implementation of a new policy which critics said could expand data collection from some two billion WhatsApp users around the world.