Messaging Apps & Geopolitics
InAugust of 2024, Pavel Durov, the co-founder and CEO of messaging app Telegram was arrested in France and now faces a number of charges. He was arrested on his private jet, having flown in from Russia, where he is a citizen and Telegram is founded. Private messaging apps are playing an increasingly significant role in geopolitics.
China bas banned most Western messaging platforms, preferring its citizens just use home grown ones like WeChat. Brazil has blocked WhatsApp on several occasions over disputes on sharing data with law enforcement. Signal has stated that if such a thing were to happen to it, they would shutdown in that country.
Yet some of these messaging apps have played and vital role in back-channel communications during times of crisis and conflict. It is purported that WhatsApp played a role in 2013–15 between Iranian and American diplomats during the nuclear deal talks.
In the 2019 tensions between India and Pakistan WhatsApp was used by officials on both sides unofficially to help ease the crisis. Some reports have said that Saudi Arabian and Israeli diplomats used WhatsApp for quiet, back-channel diplomacy, negotiating deals. Telegram channels were the primary means of activist organising during the political unrest in Belarus in 2021.
Even though WhatsApp is owned and operated by Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, rather than the USA being it’s most popular country, it is India. Even Signal, now a non-profit, founded in America, sees its largest market as Indonesia.
These messaging apps have also served darker elements and netizens due to their levels of encryption, from crypto scams and other fraudulent tactics, to use by terrorist organisations and anarchist activist movements intent on violence. Many anti-social movements from political agitators to social change movements make use of these platforms.
Messaging apps, like all information technologies, are a dual-edged sword. For governments it’s a struggle to figure out how to regulate or govern apps that have no borders and can be accessed in a multitude of ways, while they can also benefit thee governments for diplomacy. Especially in times of crises.
As consumers have become increasingly frustrated with being constantly surveilled for commercial purposes, as in always being sold to, and realize they are the product, these more private and non-surveilled platforms are becoming their preferred channels of choice. This presents challenges to marketers who’ve become over-reliant on data analytics. And as platforms like WhatsApp look to add in other services like money transfer or buying products, it will present even more challenges.
Usage trends and growth in platforms such as Signal and now Discord, are not just playing a role in geopolitics, but in shifts on eCommerce. This will present a challenge to the likes of Google and Bing search engines for ad revenue. It will also present a challenge for how governments can engage in civil dialogue with citizens.
Messaging apps present citizens with a much faster way to create larger connections and groups to organise protests, strikes and other activist functions. This then affects the flow of social capital in societies, power dynamics and digital sovereignty in every country they’re used.
These apps can also serve to promote greater inclusion and cross-cultural transmission, yet at the same time can result in echo chambers, reinforce political differences and are shifting sociocultural norms on time use and social obligations. They also blur the boundaries between public/private engagement and personal/professional boundaries, much as email has done. It means another shift in how state powers control the flow of information.
How messaging apps are chosen in different countries is often influenced by the prevailing culture. For Signal, it has gained cultural capital where societies have a deeper value of privacy or where citizens feel overly surveilled by the government and see Signal as better than Telegram or WhatsApp. In India, WhatsApp is seen as easier to access and many parts of society are just becoming more technology literate as Signal requires better technological knowledge.
There is also a fair bit of fluidity between use of these apps, usually driven by platform or government reactions. When WhatsApp changed its privacy policy in 2021, Signal saw a huge lift in new sign-ups. Sometimes, messaging apps are based on cultural preferences and become a social signal.
It is a topic that could span a book, but there is little doubt that secure and private messaging apps are going to play an increasingly vital role in government-citizen and corporate-consumer relationships.
It is interesting too in that all of these apps (except WeChat of course) have largely evolved based on the humans that use them (I find the term “user” to be dehumanising), and their operators being somewhat anarchistic in their approach to developing and managing them.
As social activism increases in a world of shifting power systems based on values (democracy vs. autocracy), a period of increased conflicts and heightened immigration challenges and the impacts of climate change, these apps will be a part of the communications and information fabric in networked, civil society dialogue and geopolitics.
