Introduction

In recent years WhatsApp has emerged as one of the world’s fastest growing platforms. Founded in 2009 by two Yahoo former employees, WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook in 2014, and is now the preferred app in more than 100 countries around the world (Sevitt, 2017). With particularly high penetration rates in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, and South Africa, WhatsApp supports sending and receiving text, photo, video, and voice calls.

WhatsApp has spread globally across diverse markets with diverse histories of online engagement. Therefore, its appeal cannot be attributed to any one factor. The popularity of WhatsApp as a preferred social media platform in the so-called global South, and in rural areas, has often been related to economic constraints and poor broadband infrastructure which limit everyday online communication to the use of smartphones and messaging, with the additional factor that some mobile phone plans allow people to use these apps for free (Tapsell, 2018). Some have argued, WhatsApp proved attractive in these markets because it offered a cheap alternative to SMS and conventional voice calls (Pereira and Bojczuk, 2018). But WhatsApp has also been enthusiastically taken up by urban middle class individuals with disposable income and fast Internet connections, and with considerable experience of using mainstream social media platforms (such as Facebook, twitter and Instagram) to communicate. For these people, it is not cheap one-on-one messaging, but other functions of the app, such as the group messaging feature and encryption, that are likely to be enticing them to turn to WhatsApp for everyday online interactions.

WhatsApp groups allow personal connections and conversations to take place between groups of up to 256 users. They afford connectivity, facilitate the formation of collective identities, and give rise to networks of weak and strong ties. This feature makes the app more like a social network (e.g., similar to Facebook groups) rather than just a text messaging or voice call service. As people use it to communicate in and through groups, the app gives rise not only to new kinds of one-to-one talk, as well as corporate and public service messaging, but also to new kinds of collective life and sociability (Pereira and Bojzuk, 2018). Although the average WhatsApp group is fewer than 10 people (Lu, 2019), research suggests that in countries like Brazil and India these numbers are higher (Banaji, et al., 2019; Caetano, et al., 2018).

Broadcast lists is another popular WhatsApp feature, which allows users to send “broadcast messages” to a saved list of contacts at once without having to select them each time. Media outlets in Spain and Latin America have been using WhatsApp broadcast lists to share news to their audiences (Newman, et al., 2018), but the feature also affords the possibility to spread misinformation and spam (Sharma, 2018).

Communication on WhatsApp has been encrypted since 2016, which affords the app an aura of security and trust, and further distinguishes it from mainstream platforms that have been shown to compromise user privacy (Zanon, 2018). However these claims must be measured against countering arguments. Research has argued that WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption is performative rather than being a core value of the company (Santos and Faure, 2018) — plus encryption does not necessarily mean that Facebook is not in a position to collect WhatsApp data (see Zanon, 2018). Yet other scholars identify encrypted chat apps as a ‘safer’ space for activists and ordinary citizens to share information and engage in civic and political networking and action, particularly in contexts where legacy media and other social media are heavily censored and surveilled by the state (Khazraee and Losey, 2016; Dencik, et al., 2016; Hintz, et al., 2019).

Despite the perception that end-to-end encryption means that surveillance is limited on WhatsApp, it also means that content circulates in a manner largely unregulated and unmoderated by the platform. This can be problematic, because as WhatsApp becomes an increasingly important channel for the dissemination of news (Newman, et al., 2018) and meme culture (Ballesteros Doncel, 2016; Ncube, 2016; Al Zidjaly, 2017), so does it play an important role in facilitating “information disorder” — the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation in closed groups not subjected to any kind of platform moderation (Wardle and Derakshan, 2017).

In Brazil’s 2018 general election, for example, partisans of the far right-leaning Jair Bolsonaro weaponized the app to spread malinformation and manipulate voter sentiment in favour of the presidential candidate (Nemer, 2018). In countries like India and Mexico, WhatsApp has been linked to mob violence (Banaji, et al., 2019; Martinez, 2018), and similar fears arise in relation to how the app is providing a safe haven for terrorists (Arianti and Yasin, 2016) and pedophiles (Constine, 2018). Some countries invoke these malicious uses of WhatsApp and other encrypted apps as evidence of the need to pass controversial legislation giving states access to private conversations. In Australia, for example, a law was passed in 2018 that would compel Facebook and other telecommunication companies to provide federal police and intelligence agencies access to encrypted conversations (Whigham, 2018).

WhatsApp’s links to ‘information disorder’, mob violence, and terrorism have been in the spotlight, but the rapid uptake of the app bears other implications that are also important to consider. For example, as people move away from, or leapfrog, the collapsing contexts that have partly contributed to social media’s allure, and towards the forging of more personal, private networks, new kinds of civic alliances and discourses are emerging, and so too are new digital “grammars” and literacies of pro-democracy movements being reshaped [1]. WhatsApp also plays an important role in enhancing solidarity and trust among communities (Baxter, 2018), mediating everyday life (Matassi, et al., 2019), as well as in the forging and maintenance of digital networks in contexts of poor tele-connectivity (Borkert, et al., 2018).

The rise of WhatsApp as an important tool for corporate communications and state communications is yet to be fully explored in the literature, but is an emerging issue for researchers of the app. In many important WhatsApp markets, and since the launch of the WhatsApp Business app, public space is littered with messages inviting users to use the app to communicate with corporations to access goods and services, prompting important questions about how the app may reshape commercial transactions by moving them more deeply into the private sphere. Similarly, states rely on WhatsApp to address the nation, as did the new Malaysian government when it used the app to release the government’s first budget (Soyacincau, 2018).

Exploration of WhatsApp as an instrumental tool for ordinary citizens, activists, government agencies, businesses, and “bad actors” meets with considerable methodological challenges too. Much current work on WhatsApp employs traditional social science methods to understand its use, for the app cannot be studied using digital methods relying on, for example, the extraction of large-scale data sets via accessing platforms application programming interfaces (APIs). Accordingly, we need to take account of how researchers are navigating the features and affordances of the app and creating new methods to know more about what kind of information circulates on the platform, who is responsible for mobilizing its spread, and content creation practices on WhatsApp.