Pod Insights The Vergecast Land of the Giants: It's a WhatsApp world About this episode We're sharing an episode of Land of the Giants: The Facebook / Meta disruption, a collaboration between Recode and The Verge.
Meta’s most expensive acquisition ever and one of the most used communication apps in the world: WhatsApp. With over 2 billion users, WhatsApp is embedded in the social, economic, and political infrastructure of countries across the globe. For better and worse. The story of WhatsApp’s incredible power, as told through its largest market: India.
NOTE: There are descriptions of graphic acts of violence in this episode. If you want to skip these descriptions, the section begins at 20:45 and ends at 22:05.
Hosted by Shirin Ghaffary (@shiringhaffary) and Alex Heath (@alexeheath)
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Transcript 5,860 words · 17 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 David Pierce? Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of unattractive messaging apps. I'm your friend David Pierce, and we are technically off today, but I wanted to play you, instead of just not having an episode, an episode of a podcast called Land of the Giants, which hopefully you're listening to. But if not, this season, The Land of the Giants is all about Facebook and Meta. The show's a collaboration between Recode and The Verge, and Shereen Ghaffari and Alex Heath have been exploring how Facebook, eventually Meta, have changed the way that we live our lives both on and off the internet. The last episode of the season dropped today. The whole series is great, you should listen to all of it. But I wanted to play you an episode, that's actually the second-to-last episode in the season, all about WhatsApp. WhatsApp is absolutely fascinating, it's
0:42 David Pierce? massive, and it changes the way that people live their lives in ways many of us, especially in the US, where WhatsApp is not as popular, don't even understand. So again, you should listen to the whole series, but I think this episode stands pretty well on its own. This is Land of the Giants.
1:05 Speaker 01 You probably don't remember where you were on October 4th, 2021.
1:09 Speaker 02 Tonight, major outage is affecting billions of users of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. All of it starting this morning and continuing through the day.
1:18 Speaker 03 All three apps went offline at the same time around the world.
1:22 Speaker 01 Inconvenience doomed scrollers on Facebook and Instagram, switched over to other platforms. So much so that the official Twitter account tweeted out, "Hello, literally, everyone."
1:34 Speaker 03 But for Rajiv Kira, WhatsApp going down was a much bigger deal. We never thought WhatsApp would be down for so long.
1:41 Speaker 01 The official shutdown lasted for about six hours, but the effects lingered in a few places, such as India, which meant enormous consequences for people like Kira. WhatsApp is his livelihood.
1:53 Speaker 03 He founded a food tech business called Chaki Pising outside New Delhi, India, that delivers freshly-milled flour and spices to people. And he runs it primarily on WhatsApp. That's where he lists available items, chats with customers, processes orders. So 70, 80% of our business was down.
2:12 Speaker 01 Kira was not alone. About 15 million businesses run on WhatsApp in India.
2:17 Speaker 04 And even today, to be very honest, we don't have an alternative which can 100% replace WhatsApp if there is a downtime.
2:25 Speaker 01 In India, WhatsApp is more than a private messaging service.
2:29 Speaker 03 For its 400 million users there, WhatsApp is the internet. Or you could put it like this.
2:35 Speaker 04 WhatsApp in India is a way of life.
2:38 Speaker 01 Keep in touch with your family: WhatsApp. Buy and sell goods: WhatsApp. Send money. Access critical medical information, like where to get a COVID vaccine: WhatsApp.
2:49 Speaker 03 Though it doesn't contribute much to Meta's bottom line yet, WhatsApp is the company's most essential product by far. That's because with over 2 billion users, WhatsApp is embedded in the social, economic, and political infrastructure of countries across the globe.
3:05 Speaker 01 But there's a dark side to connecting the world. Enormous platforms can cause enormous problems.
3:11 Speaker 05 India is WhatsApp's biggest market, and viral hoaxes on the platform are being blamed for a recent spate of mob violence.
3:18 Speaker 06 Recently in India, internet lynch mobs have killed a dozen people, including innocent bystanders.
3:24 Speaker 07 The encrypted messaging platform has become a playground for conspiracy theorists.
3:35 Speaker 03 Today, the story of WhatsApp's incredible power is told through its largest market: India. Mark Zuckerberg has had a long history with India, even before WhatsApp solidified his company's dominance there.
3:48 Speaker 01 Now WhatsApp is particularly intertwined in Indian society, for better and for worse.
4:01 Speaker 01 This is Land of the Giants.
4:10 Speaker 03 Long before WhatsApp was one of the biggest apps in the world, Niraj Arora noticed it's starting to climb the downloads chart of Google's Android Play Store.
4:19 Speaker 01 The year was 2010, and Arora was working on corporate development at Google. He was tasked with looking for startups to acquire at the dawn of the smartphone era.
4:28 Speaker 08 WhatsApp had no information about them on the website, so I emailed [email protected] . I didn't hear back for several days. Finally, I think Brian replied on support email, saying, "Why don't you come meet us at this Mountain View address?"
4:46 Speaker 03 Brian is in Brian Acton, who co-founded WhatsApp with Jan Koom. The founders met while working at Yahoo. Now they were building WhatsApp out of a small back office in Silicon Valley. Arora remembers it had an informal meeting room.
5:00 Speaker 08 So it was sort of like just a cubicle, not really a conference room. And I was like, shit, like, this is very weird, because I'm gonna talk some sensitive stuff with you, and they're like, "I don't care."
5:12 Speaker 01 Neither did Arora. He left the meeting excited about the potential for what Acton and Koom were building.
5:17 Speaker 03 He made an offer for the startup on behalf of Google: $10 million. An impressive price tag, considering that WhatsApp boasted barely a million downloads so far and hadn't raised any outside capital.
5:29 Speaker 01 And yet, Acton and Koom passed.
5:32 Speaker 03 So Arora came back within a few months with a better deal, one that he says Google co-founder Larry Page had to personally sign off on: $100 million.
5:43 Speaker 08 They said, "Look, we left Yahoo to start WhatsApp for a reason. We hate big companies, and we cannot operate the way we can here. So, thank you very much. Thanks for spending time with us."
5:56 Speaker 03 A power move that left a lasting impression.
6:01 Speaker 03 When Aurora left Google looking for his next career move, he called WhatsApp.
6:06 Speaker 08 Obviously, the only company I really wanted to like work at was WhatsApp. Like, I'd seen everything: Dropbox, Airbnb, Square. Like, all the hot darlings of the valley were not that interesting. This was sort of like the hidden gem that nobody knew about and was just growing really well, and the founders were incredible.
6:24 Speaker 01 Aurora joined WhatsApp in November 2011 as its chief business officer. And by then, WhatsApp's growth was taking off purely by word of mouth. Tens of millions of people were using the app.
6:36 Speaker 08 The most important thing was that our daily-to-monthly active users ratio
6:43 Speaker 08 was the best in the understate. I think it was around 70-something percent. Like, 70% of your monthly active users would come back daily, which was, I think, better than Facebook's.
6:56 Speaker 03 Here's why WhatsApp was taking off. It was a cheaper alternative to texting. Traditional text messaging was expensive in a lot of the world at the time. You often got charged per text. Messaging apps like WhatsApp instead used internet data plans.
7:10 Speaker 01 And WhatsApp was simple, both to sign up for and to use. Kum and Acton made a priority of supporting every kind of smartphone possible, so WhatsApp could work no matter the device. And your account was just your phone number. The app limited the information it collected on you, not your location and not the names or addresses of your contacts.
7:29 Speaker 03 This spoke to a key value for the founders of WhatsApp: privacy. From the very beginning, privacy and security were built into the company's DNA. This was more than a design feature. It was what the founders felt they owed their users.
7:43 Speaker 01 Kum was born in Ukraine during the Soviet years. Growing up, his parents avoided using the telephone for fear they were being monitored by the state.
7:51 Speaker 03 If Kum's appreciation for privacy came from his personal history, Acton's came from his professional past. At Yahoo in the 90s, he'd run an advertising platform that collected click-through data. It turned him off for good on targeted ads.
8:05 Speaker 08 He had a very, kind of like, ugly experience trying to figure that thing out. I think he didn't really enjoy that experience of collecting all the data and showing ads and all that. So when they started WhatsApp and when Brian joined, it was very clear. He said, "I'm never gonna do that." This is a very intimate and personal product that we are building. I would hate to collect... Or know what people are chatting about on my app, right? So from day one, it was not an option.
8:32 Speaker 01 Coom famously taped a note to his work desk from Acton that read, "No ads, no games, no gimmicks."
8:41 Speaker 03 WhatsApp's emphasis on simplicity and privacy was working. By early 2013, the company had 200 million active users. And with advertising off the table, Acton and Coom decided to charge a whopping 99 cents a year for the app.
8:55 Speaker 01 It wasn't much, but in the world of free social media apps like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, it was unusual. And according to Aurora, it was actually part of an effort to slow down growth to a manageable pace.
9:07 Speaker 03 But the strategy didn't work out exactly as planned.
9:11 Speaker 08 The growth never stopped. People were still paying and they were shocked. And I remember I still have the screenshot somewhere where I think there was a point where we were the top paid app on the App Store in 50 different countries at the same time.
9:26 Speaker 03 WhatsApp's success was starting to make waves. In April 2013, Coom took the stage at the All Things Dean Mobile Conference and revealed that WhatsApp had more users than Twitter.
9:36 Speaker 08 Everybody was taken aback, like, who are these guys? They never talked about themselves and now they're saying they're bigger than Twitter, right?
9:42 Speaker 01 Aurora says after Coom's mic drop, major acquisition offers rolled in. The Chinese company Tencent was the first big one, $10 billion. Google called again. This time, Larry Page wanted to meet. And the meeting got scheduled, but...
9:58 Speaker 03 It would be too late because someone else had been keeping track of WhatsApp's success, Mark Zuckerberg.
10:06 Speaker 08 We were getting into the zone of half a billion users, active users, really active every day. And with an opportunity to definitely get to a billion users and do a lot of other things than just messaging, right? So it was absolutely an existential threat for Facebook, and he knew that.
10:26 Speaker 03 As he had shown with the purchase of Instagram, Zuckerberg was always on the lookout for challengers to his social media empire. And WhatsApp's growth on mobile phones directly challenged Facebook Messenger, especially because WhatsApp was taking off in parts of the world that Messenger just wasn't.
10:43 Speaker 01 And at a more fundamental level, people were using WhatsApp for many of the same reasons they might otherwise use Facebook: to keep in touch with family and friends online. It was a network of users that might never enter the Facebook universe. Zuckerberg needed it, or he might lose to it.
11:00 Speaker 03 So he made his move. Before WhatsApp was set to meet with Google, Zuckerberg invited Kum over for dinner.
11:06 Speaker 08 Facebook said, "Look, whatever it takes, the kind of deal you want to structure, whatever you want, we'll give it to you."
11:13 Speaker 01 And by "whatever you want," they meant it.
11:16 Speaker 08 Autonomy, no ads, complete product, independence for Jan and Brian, board seat for Jan, which we didn't ask for, they offered. We said, "Okay, fine." And encryption, end-to-end encryption was, they cannot say no to it. Like, we were still working on it, and they said, "Yeah, we'll support that."
11:36 Speaker 03 End-to-end encryption was a deal point that spoke to Acton and Kum's focus on privacy. The technology would prevent anyone except the sender and the recipient of a message from being able to read it. So even WhatsApp itself wouldn't be able to know the contents of the conversations flowing through its service.
11:53 Speaker 01 The encryption deal point also spoke to an inherent tension between WhatsApp and Facebook early on. Facebook's business model depended on collecting data about users' likes and interactions, so it could use that data to personalize ads.
12:07 Speaker 08 Obviously, Jan and Brian might never put this on the record, that we were doing this partially so that Facebook never gets any information about our users. But I know for sure that was one of the reasons they wanted to do it.
12:19 Speaker 01 Even if WhatsApp's adherence to privacy was contradictory in some ways to Facebook's business, Facebook just wanted to get the deal done.
12:27 Speaker 03 Kum and Zuckerberg did just that on Valentine's Day in 2014. The agreed price? 19 billion in mostly Facebook stock. It would be Zuckerberg's largest acquisition ever, by far.
12:40 Speaker 01 The media reported at the time Zuckerberg and Kum shared a plate of seasonally appropriate chocolate-covered strawberries.
12:46 Speaker 03 It was a whirlwind romance.
12:50 Speaker 09 WhatsApp is a great company and it's a great fit for us.
12:54 Speaker 01 Just shy of two weeks after the deal was signed, Zuckerberg was in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress, a gigantic trade show for the mobile telecommunications industry.
13:03 Speaker 09 Already, almost half a billion people love using WhatsApp for messaging. And it's the most engaging app that we've ever seen exist on mobile, by far.
13:16 Speaker 03 People were stunned by how much he paid for WhatsApp. It was the most expensive purchase of any private tech startup to date. So when Zuckerberg was asked to explain his rationale, he sounded a little defensive.
13:28 Speaker 09 I actually just think that by itself, it's worth more than $19 billion. I mean, it's hard to exactly make that case today because they have so little revenue compared to that number. But I mean, the reality is there are very few services that reach a billion people in the world. They're all incredibly valuable, much more valuable than that.
13:45 Speaker 01 For Zuckerberg, WhatsApp was invaluable because it was a way to fulfill his original mission of getting as many people in the world as possible using one of Facebook's products.
13:55 Speaker 09 When Jan and I first met and started talking about this, we really started talking about what it was going to be like to connect everyone in the world. And a lot of this is the vision for internet.org and that's what I really want to take the time to focus on today.
14:11 Speaker 03 Internet.org, this project Zuckerberg talked about in the same breath as WhatsApp, was an initiative to bring internet access to various countries with untapped users, including India, which had become an incredibly attractive market to Silicon Valley.
14:25 Speaker 10 So around 2015, Silicon Valley essentially looked eastwards and said, here's this big market. It has more than a billion people. A telecom war is just getting underway. Here's our next billion users.
14:43 Speaker 01 Pranav Digjit is a technology reporter for BuzzFeed, who was based in India from 2014 to 2022. That telecom war he mentions, it meant that suddenly, India experienced a huge drop in internet data costs. A whole bunch of people who couldn't afford to get online before now could.
15:02 Speaker 10 Most people in India experience the internet almost entirely on their smartphones. India leapfrogged, as they say, the desktop PC era. Most people never had them.
15:15 Speaker 01 So, back to Zuckerberg's internet.org project, a way to get onto all those smartphones.
15:21 Speaker 03 Practically, it meant Facebook partnered with major telecom services in India and other countries to provide a free, stripped-down version of the internet. Facebook, of course, would be one of a few sites available.
15:32 Speaker 01 Facebook branded internet.org as an idealistic project to deliver the human right of connection. But many did not buy that branding, especially in India, where there were protests against Facebook's initiative. Many people, and even the government, saw it as an attempt by Facebook to control the internet. The government ended up outright banning the project. But lucky for Zuckerberg, he would still have a way to those hundreds of millions of users.
16:00 Speaker 04 WhatsApp in India is a way of life.
16:03 Speaker 01 In the years following Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp, the app flourished in India. Even with limited 2G mobile internet connections, people could load WhatsApp relatively quickly because it was simple, with far fewer features than social media apps like Facebook.
16:18 Speaker 03 WhatsApp was a success, except in one respect: revenue. Just a few years after the acquisition, conversations inside Facebook began to turn to how WhatsApp could make money. That subscription WhatsApp originally charged? Facebook removed it after the deal.
16:34 Speaker 08 They wanted to run ads on the Stories feature that WhatsApp built.
16:40 Speaker 01 Called "status," this feature was a knockoff of Instagram Stories. It launched in 2017. To Facebook, status was a natural place to run ads.
16:49 Speaker 08 They had all the infrastructure of running ads on Instagram and Facebook. So they were like, "We just plug it in." I think Brian had an allergic reaction to that. He was like, "I'm leaving." And he left a lot of money on the table.
17:02 Speaker 03 Acton walked away from roughly 850 million in Facebook shares. He would go on to become the chairman of Signal, another encrypted messaging app that's run as a nonprofit. And when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in 2018, Acton tweeted out, quote, "It is time. #DeleteFacebook."
17:20 Speaker 01 A few months after Acton left, Kum quit too, though it's unclear how much ads had to do with it. In his farewell post, he said he wanted to spend more time on his hobbies, like collecting rare air-cooled Porsches and playing ultimate frisbee.
17:35 Speaker 03 This whole situation is ironic because ads never came to WhatsApp. Facebook decided that the risk of backlash wouldn't be worth it, but not before Acton, Koom and Aurora were out the door.
17:48 Speaker 03 And then, Facebook decided to lean into the values of WhatsApp to embrace its focus on privacy as a selling point.
17:57 Speaker 11 I think you have to think about what it means to offer a service where people communicate their most private thoughts to the people they care about the most all around the world.
18:08 Speaker 01 The current head of WhatsApp, Will Cathcart. Cathcart transferred over from the Facebook app in 2019. Now, he says, Meta has embraced an ads-free WhatsApp. Instead, it's pushing to make money by charging businesses to message their customers.
18:24 Speaker 11 There are a lot of really, really sensitive conversations that happen on WhatsApp. Everything from people talking to a doctor, people talking to a journalist, and a lot of countries are WhatsApp's popular government officials talking amongst themselves. So you've got to offer the highest level of security.
18:40 Speaker 03 This preaching of WhatsApp's original values, it's not just coming from Cathcart.
18:47 Speaker 09 Privacy gives us the freedom to be ourselves. It's easier to feel like you belong when you're part of smaller communities and amongst your closest friends.
18:59 Speaker 03 Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook's F8 conference in 2019. With Russian misinformation and Cambridge Analytica behind him, this was the year Zuckerberg made a hard pivot to privacy. Specifically, he said he believed the future of communication would increasingly shift to encrypted messaging.
19:16 Speaker 09 As the world gets bigger and more connected, we need that sense of intimacy more than ever. So that's why I believe that the future is private.
19:30 Speaker 01 Privacy and encryption, they'd become virtues to Facebook. But these commitments are now putting Meta and WhatsApp at odds with the government of India, its largest market, because connecting so many people, even through private group chats, can cause real-world problems.
19:51 Speaker 12 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, "How do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting?" and "What sectors are on the move right now?" Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.
20:36 Speaker 12 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, "How do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting?" and "What sectors are on the move right now?" Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.
21:28 Speaker 01 Please note, in the second half of the episode, there are descriptions of graphic acts of violence. If you want to skip this content, exact times are given in the show notes.
21:39 Speaker 10 India lives and dies by what we call forwards, which is just people forwarding pieces of content, pictures, videos, text to each other on WhatsApp.
21:53 Speaker 01 Purnav Dixit, technology reporter for BuzzFeed News. He's describing a popular WhatsApp feature, forwarded messages, content you could easily send off to your friends or whatever groups you were a part of.
22:04 Speaker 10 You will be in like 50 different WhatsApp groups, full of people you may know, like your friends and family.
22:13 Speaker 03 And maybe you're also in a few groups with people you don't know that well, like ones for your neighborhood or school. And those can get pretty big, filled with hundreds of people.
22:22 Speaker 01 Most forwarded content tends to be mundane. Good mornings, weather reports, recipes.
22:28 Speaker 03 But as with anything that can go potentially viral, some forwards aren't so benign.
22:34 Speaker 01 In late 2017, a wave of so-called stranger danger videos spread across WhatsApp in India.
22:41 Speaker 13 These stranger danger videos that went out said the following things: Look out for your children. There are strangers in your area. They're coming to kidnap your children and take their kidneys. That was the basic message in multiple different vernacular languages across India.
22:54 Speaker 01 Shakantula Banaji is a professor of media, culture, and social change at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She researches the spread of misinformation.
23:03 Speaker 03 What struck Banaji was that these videos were carefully edited and tailored to different ethnic groups, often depicting local children being seemingly kidnapped or hurt by malicious outsiders.
23:14 Speaker 13 So for example, you'd have a video of a killing of children from Hlaapja. Overlapping that, you would have a voiceover in Tamil or Telugu or Hindi, saying something like, this is what people traffickers are doing in your area. Even though it was so clear from the visuals that the children were not locals, but nevertheless, this spread absolute panic.
23:35 Speaker 10 So there was a call to arms at the end of each of these messages, asking people to forward them and essentially almost cajoling them to take things into their own hands and do something about these people who are kidnapping their children.
23:47 Speaker 03 Purnav Dixit reported on what happened when one of these stranger danger videos went viral.
23:51 Speaker 10 I ended up traveling to this.
23:56 Speaker 10 Tiny hamlet called Rainpada, which is in the Indian state of Maharashtra, in the western part of the country, where just days before I visited, five people had been lynched to death in an extremely gruesome and brutal manner. Basically, a mob of 40 people stoned them and beat them to death inside the village council office.
24:23 Speaker 01 The video that spurred that violence, it was complete misinformation. It featured an image of dead children that was actually from the aftermath of a chemical weapons attack in Syria.
24:34 Speaker 03 But the fact that the information was being shared by people in WhatsApp groups made it feel more trustworthy.
24:40 Speaker 10 WhatsApp is your window to the world, and you believe everything that you see there. Because, you know, oh, somebody I know sent me this. A friend sent me this. Somebody from my village sent me this. So it must be true.
24:57 Speaker 01 Banaji says in addition to the trust factor, there was something else at work here, an atmosphere of heightened religious and political tensions.
25:05 Speaker 13 As we were doing our research, it became evident that very quickly the discourse morphed from it's just any stranger in your area to it's Muslim invaders, it's Muslim infiltrators, it's people from across the border, it's Bangladeshis, it's Rohingya. So really quickly. So it began to look like there had been a kind of plan all along to sow distrust and enmity against new people coming into particular areas.
25:34 Speaker 03 Regional, ethnic and religious conflicts in India predate the internet. But just as access to the internet started to grow, the political climate changed.
25:43 Speaker 13 So in 2014, Narendra Modi and his government came to power in India after a very concerted new media campaign in which they linked modern technologies to their outreach to different voter groups.
25:59 Speaker 01 Modi ran on a successful, digitally savvy campaign of political populism, vowing to put an end to corruption in India's elite ruling class. His political party, the BJP, historically has had a Hindu nationalist message, one which was amplified during the campaign and after Modi came to power.
26:17 Speaker 13 This ideology basically states that India is and always has been and always will be a Hindu, mainly Hindu nation, that Hindus should be proud of their Hinduism and should be strong.
26:30 Speaker 03 Modi's critics say that some of the viral stranger danger rumors on WhatsApp, while not directly started by Modi or the BJP, draw on religious divisions at the core of the party's politics.
26:42 Speaker 01 From around 2017 to 2018, Banaji says over 30 people were killed across India by mobs incited by misinformation spread on WhatsApp.
26:51 Speaker 03 The violence was gaining more and more attention, and pressure was mounting on WhatsApp to confront the issue.
26:58 Speaker 01 So in July 2018, WhatsApp rolled out some product changes in India to try to curb the sharing of incendiary videos and misinformation. It was a little over a year since the first major lynching connected to WhatsApp happened. Here's WhatsApp's Will Cathcart.
27:12 Speaker 11 We said, OK, how do we approach the problem? What are the things we can do to help society deal with misinformation?
27:18 Speaker 03 One of the first things WhatsApp did was to add friction to sharing, to slow down the speed at which viral content could spread.
27:25 Speaker 11 We really latched on to, well, how easy is it to send information around? And how easy is it to find alternative sources of information? So forward limits have been the biggest change by far we've made.
27:37 Speaker 01 In India, that meant a user could only forward something to five individuals or group chats simultaneously, down from the previous limit of 100. WhatsApp adopted similar rules worldwide six months later.
27:49 Speaker 03 It also removed a feature that allowed for quick forwarding and eventually replaced it with a Google search button to remind people to confirm something is true before forwarding it.
27:58 Speaker 11 We're not trying to jump in and say, hey, what you just said is false. But by changing the design of the product, we can make it easier to find out the truth than it is to quickly forward something without thinking about it.
28:07 Speaker 01 These were all important changes. But to Purnav Dixit, the company could have considered the consequences of WhatsApp's original product design sooner.
28:15 Speaker 10 That's a through line with all Silicon Valley products and platforms that have expanded into countries like India without putting in the necessary checks and balances first, without doing groundwork, without actually studying the country that they were expanding into. They saw a billion people and they were like, great, here's a billion people, let's just give them our product, our app, our service, and then let's see how they use it.
28:47 Speaker 01 For Indian regulators, though, these measures weren't enough. After WhatsApp implemented some of the changes, the Ministry of Electronics and IT issued a statement demanding it do more.
28:57 Speaker 03 The government called for WhatsApp to filter out harmful content from the source, to trace a chain of forwards back, so it could track down who was spreading violence-inducing rumors.
29:08 Speaker 01 There was one big problem, though: end-to-end encryption. One of WhatsApp's core values, a value it's stuck to all along, was that it couldn't see or trace people's messages. Nikhil Pawa is with the tech website MediaNama.
29:22 Speaker 14 If WhatsApp was doing something about misinformation in terms of trying to prevent it, it would mean that they're reading the texts and that wouldn't be into an encryption. So WhatsApp is in a very tricky situation where, at one level, it can't do much except at a product level to try and address misinformation.
29:42 Speaker 01 But another way...
29:43 Speaker 14 There's really nothing that they can do specifically to address misinformation on the platform.
29:50 Speaker 01 Here's what WhatsApp can do, according to Will Cathcart.
29:53 Speaker 11 Sometimes on the team, we talk about it as solving a problem as an architect would, rather than as a law enforcement officer would. I mean, architects think a lot about the design of a building, the design of a city. What can you do that will help create a safe environment or a safer environment over time, which is very different than when there's been a problem, a specific problem, how do you go deal with it? I think for some of these problems, like misinformation, the private nature of the product has pushed us more towards architect-type solutions, because you have to, given how private it is.
30:24 Speaker 01 Architect-type solutions, like limiting message forwarding. But other meta-platforms like Facebook and Instagram, they can take the kind of law enforcement approach Cathcart referenced. They're able to moderate content directly because they can see it.
30:37 Speaker 03 In 2021, India's Ministry of Electronics and IT issued new rules requiring social media companies to identify the, quote, "first originator of information" when requested by the government. Essentially, a legal mandate for WhatsApp to break encryption.
30:54 Speaker 01 In response, WhatsApp filed a lawsuit to block the regulations, which is still ongoing.
30:59 Speaker 11 We're trying to make the point that undermining end-to-end encryption is actually bad for the things governments care about. In any free democratic society, I believe security of people's private communications is really, really, really important. One of the points we've been making is that it is ironic. Like, governments are never asking us to increase the security we offer people. They're always asking us to lower it.
31:25 Speaker 01 The Indian government says it needs to root out the viral misinformation that incites violence. But the experts we talked to were skeptical of Modi's intentions. They worried that this could be a way for the government to crack down on open political debate in the country. Shakuntula Banaji again.
31:40 Speaker 13 If I believed in good faith that governments really intended to trace the people who were sending the murderous messages and that they were not going to only take action against the people who were organizing pro-democracy rallies, so the people who were in some way critical of the government, then I might consider de-encryption as an answer.
32:05 Speaker 03 So what is the endgame? The Indian government has proven it can be serious about social media regulation. It went so far as to ban TikTok in 2020, claiming that the app was harmful to the, quote, "sovereignty and integrity of India", basically because of its company's Chinese ownership.
32:21 Speaker 01 But many observers believe that despite this precedent and the ongoing legal challenges, WhatsApp isn't going away. Pranav Dixit again.
32:30 Speaker 10 I don't think even the government wants to be in a situation where they ban WhatsApp because it's like, what are you going to replace it with? There's nothing else.
32:40 Speaker 03 Ultimately, WhatsApp is in a high-stakes face-off with the Indian government. But unlike TikTok, WhatsApp is so entrenched in India that it can't be as easily axed.
32:50 Speaker 01 At this point, both WhatsApp and the Indian government need each other, but they're each distrustful of the other's intentions.
32:57 Speaker 03 Meta's other social networks we've talked about this season, Instagram, Facebook, they're fighting to stay relevant. WhatsApp's fight is different, and that it's coming from a place of strength. Which is maybe why Will Cathcart has a point when he says he believes that WhatsApp's model is the future.
33:15 Speaker 11 We've had this incredible growth in innovation period in social media. I think he called it "town square" social media. We're now seeing this incredible growth in more private communication services like WhatsApp and features like stories that have effemerality and groups.
33:31 Speaker 01 What Cathcart means when he refers to the "town square" social media model is essentially the core Facebook we all know well. Everyone shouting everything into the public arena, guided by algorithms that guess what we want to hear most. It's a square that's incredibly crowded, messy, chaotic.
33:49 Speaker 03 WhatsApp's way is instead more private, trusted, and simple. And even though it doesn't make Meta that much money, the trust users have in WhatsApp is invaluable. But WhatsApp still runs into that recurring Facebook problem of sometimes enabling the ugliest aspects of human behavior.
34:07 Speaker 01 Throughout the course of this season, the tension we've been tracking in each of Meta's platforms comes down, in a way, to scale. Zuckerberg has always wanted to connect the world, to have as many people as possible using his technologies. And he's been able to do that, made the right acquisitions, set the right growth metrics. But when it comes to considering the complexity of every culture, the trade-off of every product design, Meta hasn't always been able to think ahead.
34:45 Speaker 03 Next week, Zuckerberg's grandest, boldest vision to date: the metaverse. In our season finale, what would it look like for Zuckerberg to invent the next era of how we connect with each other?
35:06 Speaker 01 News clips from ABC News, CNN Business, PBS Newsweek and Channel 9 Australia.
35:12 Speaker 03 Land of the Giants: The Facebook Meta Disruption is a production of Recode, The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Megan Cunane is our senior producer. Oluwakemi Aladesui is our producer. Production support from Cynthia Be Tabiza. Jolie Myers is our editor.
35:26 Speaker 01 Richard Seema is our fact checker. Brandon McFarland composed the show's theme and engineered this episode. Samantha Altman is Recode's editor in chief.
35:35 Speaker 03 Jake Kasternakis is deputy editor of The Verge. Art Chung is our showrunner. Nishat Kurwa is our executive producer. I'm Alex Heath.
35:43 Speaker 01 And I'm Shereen Ghaffari. If you liked this episode, as always, please share it and follow the show by clicking the plus sign in your podcast app.
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36:39 Speaker 16 First Citizens Innovation Banking, formerly Silicon Valley Bank, is the bank of the innovation economy. The name may have changed, but for over 40 years, their commitment to bold ideas, relentless ambition and delivering what's next is as strong as ever. So if you're wondering where the road to innovation starts, it's here. First Citizens Innovation Banking. Head to firstcitizens.com/innovation to learn more.
Previous Twitter is a mess, Apple 'Far out' rumors, and this week in streaming Next Snap laying off 20 percent of employees, Twitter starts testing edit button, and Logitech’s cloud gaming handheld leaks Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
