š āPrivateā Interactions
WhatsApp spam out of control in India | Starlink internet failing in Ukraine | Remember Xcheck?
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This week was something I could have done without š**.** Letās see why:
Elon Musk is going to āsolveā the war in Ukraine
WhatsApp has been ruined by spam in India
Metaās Xcheck has given an Indian political official powers to remove Instagram posts all by himself
šŖ Isnāt it funny when private companies try and solve massive problems?
The answer is no: itās not funny. Right at the start of the Ukraine war, Elon Muskās vigorous and foreboding god complex prompted him to send Starlink kits over to Ukraine to keep their defenses connected to each other.
In theory, this was a good idea ā and for a while it worked. But in practice what Ukraine has now is failing infrastructure when they need it most. There have been massive outages leaving military forces unable to talk to each other. Weird that even though the technology is brand new and has hardly been used by consumers, it didnāt somehow magically work perfectly in a crisis situation.
Even weirder that Musk cannot simply āsolveā this war by calling Putin a pedophile and sending a single motorboat over to Ukraine. Instead, heās brainstorming his terrible ideas out loud on twitter, such as āwhy donāt the Ukrainians who have been invaded simply vote to decide whether they want to be part of Russia or not??ā
This really is technosolutionism at its best: Elonās final unsolicited nail in the none-of-your-business coffin was to complain that providing Starlink internet to Ukraine has cost him too much money. What a class act.

š„Ā Wham bam thank you spam
So in India, WhatsApp is HUGE. Itās the main way people share and exchange information. This is exactly why over the last year, Meta have increased the WhatsApp business capabilities in the country, making it easier to send payments, deal with complaints, cancel subscriptions etc etc. What this means in practice for regular users is that they are now completely over-run with irrelevant spam from brands that they donāt care about.
Right⦠before we continue, I would like you to cast your mind back to 2019. So this was a year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and Mark Zuckerberg decided to make a huge announcement about privacy. He wrote a āfacebook noteā (šĀ ) about his āprivacy focussed vision for social networkingā. In this post, he made some radical ā as in, radical for this context ā statements about the importance of maximising privacy in social interactions. His shareholders and other capitalists called this a āpivot to privacyā and wondered how he was even going to make it work, considering his business model relies heavily on the constant extraction of user data.
In the post he championed āprivate interactionsā and talked about how āthe living roomā will soon be the preferred mode of connecting with each other over āthe town squareā. And he centred WhatsApp as a great example of this ā reiterating over and over again that it is end-to-end encrypted (which should be the bare minimum for any messaging platform tbh) and that the conversations you have on there are only between you and your loved ones.
This was of course total rubbish, because it was just deflection. I donāt know any bigger ātown squareā than Zuckerbergās proposed metaverse, and WhatsApp is technically still a space for private interactions, but those interactions are happening between brands, and people who have to spend a few minutes everyday deleting their incessant messages. This tweet sums it up pretty well:

š¤”Ā How to take down someone elseās post on Instagram
I donāt have time to give this story the love it deserves, but I donāt know if any of you remember Xcheck? Itās the āspecial powersā that Meta will give high profile accounts so that they are not subject to the same levels of content moderation as regular users.
Anyway, The Wire have discovered that a political party official in India is using this power to make false claims that instagram posts he simply does not like are in violation of Metaās terms of use. The thing is, claims from this account, because it is protected by Xcheck, get actioned straight away with no questions asked. He has now reported 705 posts, and theyāve all been taken down.
šĀ Personally I think that this is great for:*
Democracy
Transparency
Keeping it real
*sorry did I say great I meant very bad.
Thatās it for this week, have fun not turning the heating on until some arbitrary pre-specified date in deep-winter āļø