Remember What Mark Zuckerberg Said About Private Messaging in 2019

‘This is the future I hope we will help bring about’

Damon Beres
OneZero

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Photo: Tobias Hase/picture alliance/Getty Images

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…

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