Apple said it removed WhatsApp and Threads from its China app offerings Friday on Beijing’s orders, amid technological tensions between the U.S. and China.
Mining News Audiences On WhatsApp
The wildly popular app reaches 2 billion people globally, but newsrooms have been slow to embrace it. Two news startups in South Africa and New Hampshire are showing that WhatsApp can be fertile ground for engaged audiences.
Security experts tracking the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp outages say they could have been triggered by a configuration error or could be the result of an internal mistake. An outside hack is viewed as less likely.
Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram Suffer Worldwide Outage
Facebook said late Monday that “the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change” and that there is “no evidence that user data was compromised as a result” of the outage. The company apologized and said it is working to understand more about the cause, which began around 11:40 a.m. ET Monday.
The Federal Trade Commission on Monday voted to issue orders to nine major internet platforms requiring information about how they handle data for a new study. The orders, which do not implicate any legal wrongdoing, were sent to Amazon, ByteDance (the parent company of TikTok), Discord, Facebook, Reddit, Snap, Twitter, WhatsApp and Youtube. The agency is requesting information about how the platforms collect, use, track or estimate personal and demographic information.
Exclusives
How WXTV Superserves Audience With WhatsApp
When Univision announced expanded local news apps for seven of its top markets this week, one of the platforms for “integrated social media sharing capabilities” was a channel you won’t usually see in similar English-language-station releases. It’s WhatsApp, the world’s most popular messaging app, but one that’s little-used by U.S. newsrooms.
The WhatsApp mobile app may be relatively peripheral to U.S. users, but in Latin America it’s essential. That’s why Univision is using it as a tool to send out brief but constant bulletins to Caribbean users being battered in this brutal hurricane season.
Facebook is taking the long view with its purchase of the popular smartphone messaging service. WhatsApp has 450 million monthly users, 70% of whom use it every day. The service is adding a million new users a day. There are 19 billion messages sent and 34 billion received via WhatsApp each day, in addition to 600 million photos and 100 million video messages.
