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Why WhatsApp Matters

Since its launch in 2009, and following Meta’s purchase for the astronomical figure of $19 billion in 2014 (Olson, 2014), WhatsApp has become essential to individuals’ and organizations’ communication needs around the world. For the vast majority of its users, WhatsApp supports mundane and ephemeral forms of sociality and connectedness, with the circulation of jokes, news, stickers, ‘praying chains’, memes and ‘Good morning’ messages being popular cultural forms that foster intimacy, connection and joy between close and sometimes distant loved ones (Gajjala & Verma, 2018; Gómez Cruz & Harindranath, 2020; Karapanos et al., 2016). This was evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, where the volume of daily WhatsApp messages grew to 2.5 times that of normal usage, indicating the role this technology played in keeping people connected during the crisis (Seufert et al., 2022). WhatsApp became a platform to maintain connections with family and friends, but also to facilitate classroom education and work, as stay-at-home public health orders came into effect (Feldmann et al., 2021). It provided a lifeline to businesses forced to close during extended lockdowns, with reports from Latin America indicating a growth in business communication with customers. WhatsApp’s business and pay integrations transformed WhatsApp into a vital sales channel for companies in Mexico and Brazil.1 Indicating its more nefarious uses, high volumes of health misinformation also began circulating through the platform, leading Singaporean (Basu, 2020), Australian (Brown, 2020) and Indian governments (Singh, 2020a) to set up dedicated WhatsApp channels and chatbots to try to counter the rising tide.

As these examples show, WhatsApp matters because it is part of the fabric of daily social life in many parts of the world, especially in the Global South. Since its early years, it has been hailed as a safe space for activists to organize and discuss politics (Pang & Woo, 2020), and a global distribution platform for news and entertainment (Boczek & Kloppers, 2020, p. 126; Newman et al., 2018). It also matters because in some regions it is evolving to become a critical platform for business and an essential tool for governments and organizations to communicate with the public (Basu, 2020; Singh, 2020a). But equally, uses of the platform that perpetuate harm also matter, since problematic practices arising from design changes, such as encryption, or changes to privacy and data-sharing policies, have led to highly publicized clashes between Meta and contesting social forces, including civil society, governments, regulators, media industries, human rights organizations and others. The multifaceted uses of WhatsApp and the debates they ignite are an important focus of this book and help answer the question of why WhatsApp matters.

Although it was founded in the US by Acton and Koum, WhatsApp’s popularity grew fastest in non-English-speaking countries in Latin America (Gómez Cruz & Harindranath, 2020; Matassi et al., 2019; Pereira & Bojzuk, 2018; Saboia, 2016), India (Gajjala & Verma, 2018; Venkataramakrishnan, 2015), Southeast Asia (Ling & Lai, 2016; Tapsell, 2018) and Europe (Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2021; Vincent, 2014). In many of these regions, WhatsApp became popular because of its low data usage and low cost relative to standard phone calls and SMS (Gómez Cruz & Harindranath, 2020; Tapsell, 2018). In addition, smartphone usage in these markets had just begun to take off when WhatsApp was introduced, with low-cost smartphones entering into countries that had not experienced the home PC revolution, turning them into ‘mobile-first’ markets. Without a natural competitor, WhatsApp grew enormously in these countries and regions. By contrast, users in the US and Global North markets did not have the same motivation to switch to WhatsApp. For them, most data plans came with unlimited SMS, meaning an alternative messaging service was not needed. Secondly, users in the US had already experienced the PC revolution and established many of their social networks on web-based social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Skype (McMillan, 2014). This meant that the ‘switching costs’ (see Introduction) exceeded the benefit of setting up their networks anew on WhatsApp.

WhatsApp’s simple design further contributed to its wide appeal (see table 1.1), with users only requiring a mobile phone number to register an account, while the interface mimicked SMS with some additional features, making it familiar (Baulch et al., 2020; Gajjala & Verma, 2018). As more social features were added, WhatsApp became so integrated into daily routines in many contexts that people relied on it in order to function in everyday life (Gómez Cruz & Harindranath, 2020).

Table 1.1: WhatsApp users by country 2023

Since Meta’s purchase of WhatsApp, its reach and its meaning to users in key markets has evolved, becoming about much more than interpersonal communication. Instead, it has grown into a platform supporting small and large businesses, and through which everyday users in some parts of the world can catch an Uber using a chatbot in WhatsApp, do their shopping, receive business deals and promotions, pay bills and even have their ID and other personal documents verified (Mari, 2020; Soeyuenmez, 2022).2 Such is the experience of users in India and Brazil, where WhatsApp’s business features and other design updates are often first tested before they are rolled out elsewhere.

In tracing these developments, the chapter is divided into three main sections. First, we situate WhatsApp in the context of the ‘appification’ of global culture (Ling et al., 2020; Morris & Murray, 2018). We use insights from mobile media scholars (Goggin, 2006; Goggin & Hjorth, 2008; Hjorth et al., 2012; Ling & Lai, 2016; Ling et al., 2020) to position WhatsApp within the smartphone revolution, focusing specifically on the emergence of the app store as a key infrastructure facilitating the uptake of mobile instant messaging. In the second section, we describe WhatsApp’s origin story and evolution, from 2009 up until its purchase by Meta in 2014. We trace WhatsApp’s development from its original design, and the vision of its founders, Koum and Acton, to its evolution in relation to Asian and North American competitors in the messaging ecosystem, providing insight into its similarity to and departure from these technologies and their business models.

The third section focuses on the period following Meta’s purchase of WhatsApp. Here, we turn our attention to how Meta sought to leverage WhatsApp’s already significant user base to expand its reach in the Global South. We examine how the ‘Free Basics’ program, pioneered by Meta to increase dependency on its flagship platform, Facebook, was used to grow WhatsApp’s user base in the Global South to the extent that for many it became the main access point to the internet (Bucher, 2021; Gómez Cruz & Harindranath, 2020; Nothias, 2020; Pereira & Bojzuk, 2018). The section concludes by turning to the question many commentators were asking in the early years of Meta’s purchase of WhatsApp: how Meta would monetize the app. Tracing this development, we examine one of the many scandals initiated by design and policy changes intended to make the platform profitable, referring to the departure of founders Acton and Koum after Meta introduced changes to its Terms of Service to facilitate business integrations, betraying its earlier promises. This is a defining moment that paved the way for WhatsApp’s development into a global communication and business platform. This transformation, we argue, has gradually challenged Acton and Koum’s vision of WhatsApp as a privacy-focused, simple and reliable communication tool.

The appification of global culture

Mobile media studies are an important starting point for our analysis, providing a rear-view mirror glance at the development of mobile communication apps, from the introduction of the cell phone to the smartphone revolution and the appification of culture through the Apple iOS store.

Early scholarship on mobile media already observed that mobile phones did more than render telephony mobile by replacing fixed-line, one-to-one calls with those on wireless and mobile networks. They extended the very meaning of telephony by converging telecommunication and software developments,...