WhatsApp in the World

Disinformation, Encryption, and Extreme Speech

Sahana Udupa, Herman Wasserman

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English

New York University Press
08 July 2025

Media studies; Media, information & communication industries; Communications engineering & telecommunications; Digital lifestyle

A global analysis of the vastly popular instant messaging service

Known by the popular nickname ""ZapZap"" in Brazil and synonymous with the Internet across Africa and South Asia, WhatsApp has emerged as a major means of communication for millions of people around the world. Unlike social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, WhatsApp offers a closed, encrypted communication architecture that ostensibly limits the reach and exposure of shared content.

While recent scholarship has drawn attention to the risks it poses to democratic systems and marginalized communities, WhatsApp in the World is the first study to offer a systematic global view of an encrypted instant messaging service. Rather than taking the technical feature of ""encryption"" at face value, the volume proposes the conceptual framework of ""lived encryptions"" to highlight the different, often contradictory, formations around encrypted messaging, as evidenced in the way the promised confidentiality of encrypted messaging is upturned completely when surveilling states seize the phones from suspected dissenters to download the data, or how seemingly closed group communication is channelized to ""broadcast"" top-down political messages.

WhatsApp in the World features field-based and multidisciplinary research, including contributions from practitioners at leading fact-checking institutions on how encrypted instant messaging services play a critical role in shaping extreme speech and disinformation ecosystems in different regions of the world. From election manipulations in South Africa and Nigeria to Russian diaspora activism in Europe to WhatsApp use as an everyday infrastructure in Brazilian favelas and among nationalists in India, this volume demonstrates how many core features of WhatsApp—from disappearing messages and quick forwards to group chats and calls—allow for the amplification of disinformation and extreme speech. Highlighting complex political dynamics on the ground, it also introduces the significant methodological challenges of studying encrypted messaging services, providing critical pathways to address issues around ethical and technical issues of data protection, privacy, and confidentiality.

Edited by: Sahana Udupa, Herman Wasserman
Imprint: New York University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 653g
ISBN: 9781479833269
ISBN 10: 1479833266
Pages: 277
Publication Date: 08 July 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Sahana Udupa (Editor) Sahana Udupa is Professor of Media Anthropology at the University of Munich (LMU) and author of Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics and co-author of Digital Unsettling: Decoloniality and Dispossession in the Age of Social Media. She is also coeditor of Digital Hate: The Global Conjuncture of Extreme Speech and Media as Politics in South Asia. Herman Wasserman (Editor) Herman Wasserman is Professor of Journalism at Stellenbosch University. He is the author of Tabloid Journalism in South Africa; Media, Geopolitics, and Power: A View from the Global South; and The Ethics of Engagement: Media, Conflict and Democracy in Africa. He is also coeditor of Disinformation in the Global South.

Reviews for WhatsApp in the World: Disinformation, Encryption, and Extreme Speech

""Banal and familiar to its users but complex and ambiguous in its impact, WhatsApp's closed doors make it harder to study than the darlings of digital platform research, Facebook and X. Undeterred, the authors of this volume make sense of its multiple ambivalences: how, for example, WhatsApp affords users private spaces while also serving as a channel for the broadcast of organised hate propaganda. This book represents a quantum leap in scholarly knowledge about of one the world's most engaging communication platforms and the human networks it activates."" (Cherian George, author of Fighting Polarisation) ""Two leading scholars of media, journalism, and disinformation have gathered a comprehensive collection of chapters that shed light on issues of burning importance globally. Their treatment of extremism, freedom of speech, and disinformation issues as they become manifest in the use of the universally popular WhatsApp is an undoubtedly original contribution to our understanding of the global struggle in which truth is assaulted from all sides. This volume is poised to become a classic reference for years to come, and a valuable tool in teaching and research."" (Marwan M. Kraidy, Northwestern University)