Worried about Signal, WhatsApp is taking out full page ads in Indian Newspapers

https://twitter.com/chandrarsrikant/status/1349181160107110401

by hgarg • 6 years ago

53 23 6 years ago

It's also scary that, as a participant to this market struggle for dominance, Facebook has tools at its disposal to severely restrict the growth of its competition by declaring them a harmful meme. They have publicly declared their ability and process for reducing distribution on such "viral" memes after earlier incidents where the spread of misinformation through chain/group forwards led to violence.[1a][1b] [edit] Here's a more relevant link about the implied distribution controls: [1c] Since this effort launched in 2018, the definition of the content that can be restricted has morphed to include "Fake news" and "Rumors" in addition to pure violence alone.

Facebook owned companies have a long history of distrust from the Indian public and this has played out at least one earlier time with Facebooks attempt at a free internet in India, being labelled the equivalent of the British empires attempt at colonization [2]

The narrative in India (Or other parts of the world where i have large teams who have a casual enough relationship with me to talk about these issues) isn't presently helped by the happenings in the US where large US tech companies have effectively levied sanctions against entities with political affiliation to one political movement.

This is anecdotal, but i'm hearing a lot of "What happens if they decide tomorrow that we don't fit their values?" ; There's also an ongoing financial dispute that has prompted Google to block Australian news sites [3] and the forums there are split between the two sides and how this diminishes independence of media thanks to unparalleled market power of tech companies.

[1a] https://www.wired.com/story/how-whatsapp-fuels-fake-news-and... [1b] https://blog.whatsapp.com/more-changes-to-forwarding [1c] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/19/facebook-... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32795270 [2] https://www.afr.com/companies/media-and-marketing/google-blo...

therockspush• 6 years ago

Seems like its not a coincidence that the signal community is seeing a cluster of town jackasses showing up.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25757398

dilippkumar• 6 years ago

Anyone know how this works? If everything that Facebook claims in that newspaper advertisement is true, then Facebook has

- paid $19 billion to buy whatsapp

- Removed whatsapp’s subscription model and given it away for free

- Has been paying the bills for the infrastructure and maintenance costs of a massively popular service

- Paid for a full page advertisement in newspapers with claims that whatsapp data will not be monetized like the other Facebook services

This makes zero sense to me. Everything about whatsapp looks like an expense to Facebook. Can someone more knowledgeable please help make sense of this situation?

guerrilla• 6 years ago

Not that I buy what they're selling in your fourth point for the long term, but I imagine ads like on Facebook.

skzv• 6 years ago

The only rationalization I can imagine is that providing whatsapp potentially prevents the emergence of a competitor who steals users from Facebook through their chat service.

bryan_w• 6 years ago

Facebook wants to get businesses to use whatsapp and that's where they will get value. Payments + services for businesses will subsidize the E2EE personal chat.

0800LUCAS2• 6 years ago

This is called commoditization. Pretty much every company does this.

You offer a product that would normally be paid, for free and gain market share. Then you build a business on top of that customer base you created.

That's where WhatsApp comes in for Facebook. They've gained huge market share, now they can attract businesses that want to sell directly to consumers. This is pretty handy and common in countries like Brazil.

Before people start shouting against Facebook, I'll reiterate that every company does this: - Microsoft did by driving PCs' prices down so they could gain software market share. - Stripe does it, with things like Stripe Atlas. They commoditize creating your own business by making it very simple. The idea is that [some of] those new businesses will eventually use Stripe and will help the company grow.

This is a pretty common pattern.

tinus_hn• 6 years ago

They have a captive audience of just about everyone. They can put things in the WhatsApp client and everyone will see it.

Almost everyone has WhatsApp, much more people than have Facebook. And Facebook is slowly dying.

Facebook bought WhatsApp (and also Instagram) so Facebook the company has a future. Because it’s not quite sure Facebook the network has one.

andy1729• 6 years ago

Facebook has monetization plan for whatsapp in India. In partnership with Reliance Jio, they are launching an e-commerce on whatsapp! So all of these strategies including publishing ad in newspapers makes sense in that regard

reacharavindh• 6 years ago

“WhatsApp does not share contacts with Facebook or anyone else” Is that true? Or just evil wordplay? I thought they were interested in WhatsApp’s metadata all along..?

DisjointedHunt2• 6 years ago

Wordplay. If you have a Whatsapp user matched to a User ID and that User ID then matched to a Facebook user, you're technically not "Sharing phone contacts" but, you're actually sharing contacts.

BayAreaEscapee• 6 years ago

I feel for the foreign (non USA) countries that are subject to this kind of gaslighting from Big Tech. At least in the United States, we can proposition our own politicians to reign in the excesses of Big Tech in our own country.

Foreign countries have no real alternative: there is no way to lobby Big Tech for change. They have no real voice far away in Washington DC.

In some cases they can just block some site or app and insist people use the locally developed alternative, but this isn't really all that effective. Usually the local alternative has some deficiencies, and it doesn't always work: look at the way Russia failed to block Telegram a few years ago.

0800LUCAS2• 6 years ago

TBH I disagree with your statement here. It's not just the USA that can do this. Europe and UK did this pretty successfully. Thanks to their legislation Facebook won't share data with WhatsApp.

But I agree what you say is true when it comes to emerging countries. But then again, maybe they do.

Take Brazil or India as examples. They have such massive population that if they wanted to, they could impose financial penalties to Facebook for doing that. The problem is figuring out if politicians in those countries have the incentive to do that though.

fakedang2• 6 years ago

Considering that the current Indian government already sells driving license data, hahaha.

shripadk• 6 years ago

WhatsApp won't be able to do anything about it. Even with publishing full page ads. It is just a big waste of money. I have had so many of my relatives and friends move to Signal already. Big Tech companies haven't yet understood Indian psyche. If we make a move it will be en masse. So never antagonise Indians. Just see what happened to Tik Tok. The next big movement would be from Twitter if Twitter doesn't fix its ridiculous ideological censorship policies.

bicepjai• 6 years ago

I got a message from telegram that’s says “”” Telegram surpassed 500 million active users.

In the past 72 hours alone, more than 25 million new users from around the world joined Telegram.

Thank you! These milestones were made possible by users like you who invite their friends to Telegram.

If you have contacts that joined in the last few days, you can welcome them using one of Telegram’s unique features, such as an animated sticker or a video message.

To find out more about Telegram features, have a look at https://t.me/TelegramTips “””

ricardo81• 6 years ago

Google Trends, United States, Whatsapp vs Signal vs Telegram. Perhaps they need ads in Uncle Sam also.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&ge...

bythckr• 6 years ago

"If you could make God bleed, people would cease to believe in Him."

...

"All that for a drop of blood?"

...

"If it bleeds, we can kill it"

...

"Avengers Assemble."

kylehotchkiss• 6 years ago

This comes somewhat recently after several Chinese apps were banned and calls for using more local/national alternatives. TikTok is gone, so now India has Moj.

WhatsApp has big market share but as a foreign company asking users to accept a less private policy, people are understandably going to seek alternatives, and potentially even build them.

WhatsApps big hope in India is payments processing but recent government policy changes allow payment payment processors a max of 30% of total payment volumes per app (https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/npci-imposes-cap-on-...) which probably makes the prospect less exciting, and with users beginning to seek greener pastures for messaging apps, I'm curious what WhatsApp's next play in India will be.

villgax• 6 years ago

Even Facebook bought a lot of Indian Airport & newspaper Ads when the EU lawsuits were working up.

WhatsApp's actual ToS mentions they do have access to location data.

m-p-3• 6 years ago

And even if you don't know anyone using Signal, I still recommend to setup an account. Maybe someone you know is already on it and you didn't know?

Worried about Signal, WhatsApp is taking out full page ads in Indian Newspapers

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