The Erosion of Democracy Is Your Fault

The erosion of democracy in the United States did not begin with Facebook, nor will it end with Facebook. Facebook merely is profiting from an ongoing process of propaganda, deregulation, and selling out to the highest bidder that has been going on since at least the 1970's, if not much earlier.

I don't have solutions for the US: every fix is predicated on fixing another part of the system first. Whether it's about education, policing, prisons, healthcare, lobbying, surveillance, finance, or corporatism in general: the US population has been held hostage to money for over a generation, and everything that needs to be fixed is now entrenched.

Abandoning Whatsapp for another app is not going to make one iota of difference. Want to really change things in this area? Go advocate for the Signal protocol to be submitted as an RFC with mandatory server-to-server federation. Make sure there's an open-source, easy-to-deploy server implementation, and then go haunt the ITU to mandate its deployment for the 5G+1 standard. Advocate protocols, not apps.

Also, if you are using social media that (hypothetically, I'm not checking my facts here, just wondering aloud), contributed to color revolutions in the Middle East and in Ukraine, as well as to mass protests in Belarus and in Washington, then what is it that you are passively supporting?

(disclaimer: I've never used whatsapp, so just idly curious about the rhetoric)

That said, they're a private company, people still have a free choice whether to use them or not, use another communications platform if you're unhappy with their terms of service.