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Remember What Mark Zuckerberg Said About Private Messaging in 2019
‘This is the future I hope we will help bring about’
We knew all of this was coming.
On Tuesday, New York Times tech reporter Davey Alba wrote that private groups are driving the vast majority of interactions on a viral piece of pro-Trump misinformation on Facebook, operating “beyond what researchers and journalists can see.”
“Only 2.5 percent of FB activity — likes, shares, comments — is visible on public FB,” Alba tweeted, citing CrowdTangle, a social media analytics tool.
This is by design. In March 2019, Mark Zuckerberg published “A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking,” a lengthy blog post that many publications took to calling a “manifesto.” This was two months after a New York Times report indicated that Facebook would consolidate its private messaging platforms on WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger into a single platform, a plan that is just now starting to come to fruition. The objective for a more privacy-minded approach, as…
