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That's a pretty ignorant statement. Facebook and its services, especially Whatsapp, are the most widespread form of communication in many countries. Particularly in poor/developing countries, hardly anything else is used because mobile Internet is available cheaply, unlike voice services and SMS. Whatsapp is indispensable there.

See https://www.statista.com/statistics/291540/mobile-internet-u... for example.

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That's an argument against the Facebook Empire, not an argument for it.

Economies and comms infra should not have a single point of failure - clearly.

If Facebook wasn’t there monetizing their data to keep them in poverty maybe an open source tool would be instead.

That’s an amazingly ignorant statement. A lot of the value of WhatsApp at acquisition time was that it supported a ton of feature phones and J2ME, something largely ignored in the West. You can have open source all you want but someone still has to run infra.

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