Meanwhile: https://19thnews.org/2026/10/meta-anti-lgbtq-misinformation-midterm-elections/
Stop using Meta products.
I guess having official confirmation is nice, but also… what big election has Meta/Facebook not meddled in recently?
Have you seen the internal comms between Zuck and his CMO about the 2016 US elections and Cambridge Analytica? They explicitly said that the Reps took their marketing advice while the Dems didn’t and essentially confirmed that it’s part of their “portfolio” that they’re building to flip elections.
I’m sure that the US gov (and many others) have paid attention since then.
That was specifically what I was thinking of when I wrote that.
Love how meta just operates this way openly and nobody lifts a finger. Those fuckers should have been destroyed ages ago
They need to be broken up like Ma Bell. A lot of the tech giants should get broken up
Like they didn’t learn from the Cambridge Analytica incident.
Sure they did. They fucked around, received no consequences, and found out they’re allowed to do that
Yeah they did, they learned that the public outrage will last a few weeks at best
Choosing not to even start working on a WhatsApp replacement at this late in the game is suicidal. EU is doing good getting rid of MS, but meta is an even more dangerous leech
Ive never used WhatsApp. What niche does it really fill? Is it a conventional phone/text replacement for people?
The replacement exists¹. The problem is making people use it.
¹ Matrix and XMPP.
I use them myself, and i guarantee that they’re not a viable alternative, because the average person finds them very hard to use
When I mention this, people around foss communities often say “oh, but it’s like email”
Exactly! People don’t know how to use email!
For some chat app to be a viable replacement, it needs to register by phone number, without passwords, and find all your contacts automatically. The closest we have is signal, but the server isn’t open source, and its nonprofit group is tied to the usa
I agree, but those base technologies are not currently a replacement for WhatsApp. We should have been funding development and integration of a social stack 5 years ago.
It’ll need seamless payment and identity validation functionality, and significant user experience and reliability work before it can be a replacement. That all has to be in place before implementation which is a separate major challenge
Payment is something completely different. It doesn’t need it.
I mentioned that because as I understand it, WhatsApp is so inescapable due to being used for purchases. I don’t have first hand knowledge but if it was just a discord clone it wouldn’t have the lock in.
If people in your country use watsapp for purchases, you have 2 different problems, that you need to solve independently.
Canada developed the Interac system long before Credit Cards and PayPal. Granted, it hasn’t had the development resources it deserves, but it’s light-years ahead of any other independent model. “Inescapable” is a choice, not an inevitability.
Matrix is good, but has some serious convenience issues around authenticating new devices. And locking messages on public group chats if resetting your “recovery key”.
What is EU doing to get rid of MS? I know individual countries are rolling out alternative tools for their public administration, but EU? I haven’t heard anything.
EU supports some open source projects, not just the ones competing with MS tools. Most projects promoted as “European alternative to X” are private, EU based companies, not backed by EU in any way. I might be wrong but I think EU is not in the software development game at all. They try to regulate US companies and they try to create the right conditions for private companies in EU to grow but they don’t work on any replacements themselves. And I think it would be weird for EU to do it. Individual countries should be doing it.
I misspoke, I just meant to refer to the various countries that have been working on it without having to look up which ones it was. You’re right though
That’s fair, I guess I’m overly sensitive about the “EU” vs “EU members” difference. Sometimes it’s very important, in this case not so much.
How is any meta product still legal? Either it hurts democracies and should be banned, or democracies are not really democracies and election interference is encouraged.
