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WhatsApp Won’t Save Facebook
Zuckerberg’s “privacy-focused vision” for social media misses some big problems
Mark Zuckerberg said last week that the future of Facebook may look a little more like WhatsApp, the private messaging service his company acquired for $19 billion back in 2015.
“I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever,” he wrote in a blog post about his “privacy-focused vision for social networking.”
Zuckerberg’s manifesto misses something big: WhatsApp and other private messaging services have, at times, enabled deeply toxic communications.
Not surprisingly, rumors have swirled recently that Facebook might consolidate its messaging platforms — Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram — into one central “platform or protocol,” as CBS News put it. There are risks involved — for people who rely on these messaging services, a centralized outage like the one occurring throughout Facebook’s services this week, could be disastrous. But the move seems otherwise sensible, even responsible, in an era dominated by “fake news” and…
