Why Are We All In So Many WhatsApp Groups? A Deep Dive

IT’S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair. We’ve hand-picked some of the week’s best reads for you to savour. 1. WhatsApp’s rise to the top Are you a member of far too many Whatsapp groups, most of which have been long-muted? Well, you’re probably in the majority then. The platform has become a core technology around the world, relied on by governments and extended families alike. But how did it get so popular? (The New Yorker, approx 27 minutes reading time) “My sister created a family WhatsApp group, for relatives on both sides of the Atlantic, on July 8, 2017. By then, I was using the app for work. British politics and, arguably, the British state are coördinated by WhatsApp. Ninety-two per cent of U.K. internet users are on the platform. Police officers banter on it. The National Health Service relies on it. On the afternoon of March 13, 2020—ten days before the U.K. entered its first COVID lockdown—Dominic Cummings, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, formed a five-man WhatsApp group that came to more or less run the country.” 2. The Gaza-bound aid Israel won’t let in Our reporter travelling in the middle east, Eimer McCauley, visited a Jordanian warehouse which is holding tonnes of aid for Gaza that Israel won’t let through. Some of the aid has already reached its expiration date, including €100,000 worth of antibiotics donated by India, while others essentials are about to expire. (The Journal, approx five minutes reading time) “In a warehouse in North-Eastern Jordan, an aid worker is standing in the middle of a warehouse full of food donations from countries across the world intended to reach people who are starving in Gaza. Some of the pallets have been there for months, some for a year.” 3. ICE allegations Protests continue across the US following the fatal shooting of Renee Good by a federal immigration agent in Minnesota last week. This investigation by ProPublica alleges more evidence of wrongdoing by the agency enforcing Trump’s controversial immigration crackdown, including evidence of over 40 cases of ICE agents using banned chokeholds. “An agent in Houston put a teenage citizen into a chokehold, wrapping his arm around the boy’s neck, choking him so hard that his neck had red welts hours later. A black-masked agent in Los Angeles pressed his knee into a woman’s neck while she was handcuffed; she then appeared to pass out. An agent in Massachusetts jabbed his finger and thumb into the neck and arteries of a young father who refused to be separated from his wife and 1-year-old daughter. The man’s eyes rolled back in his head and he started convulsing.” (ProPublica, approx 18 minutes reading time) Advertisement 4. The future of peat in Ireland Caitlín Doherty explores the recent history of energy disputes around data centres, peat and wind turbines in Ireland over the last few years. (The Baffler, approx 20 minutes reading time) “In October 2022, Dáil Éireann, the lower house of the Irish Parliament, passed legislation banning turf’s commercial sale. In a confusing attempt at compromise, it would henceforth be legal to buy sods from one’s neighbor but not from one’s neighbor’s shop. The bill allowed for private sale of turf between individuals but not its retail or advertising; an informal market was thus formally recognized as an economic necessity to alleviate the tensions caused by the green transition. On the bill’s passage, Eamon Ryan, its author and then-leader of the country’s liberal-centrist Green Party, conducted a victory lap. His adversaries, mostly independent members of parliament or representatives of Sinn Féin, lined up in a series of tempestuous chamber and prime-time debates to denounce the move as “premature, daft, unworkable and senseless,” per Sinn Féin’s Darren O’Rourke. Nothing, he noted, “is worse for health than poverty.”” 5. Craig The heartbreaking story of Craig, a UK man who became homeless at 13 after running away from a children’s home in Nottingham and lived a life marked by hardship until his premature death last year. (The Guardian, approx 20 minutes reading time) “Craig was a runaway when I first met him. Missing from a local children’s home, he spent his days hanging out in Nottingham city centre. He had just turned 13 and he was tall for his age, easily recognisable with his blond hair, but he seemed invisible to the authorities. No one was looking for him or the other dozen children who congregated on the market square. Most of them had absconded from care, some were dodging school. A few, like Craig’s mate Mikey, just didn’t bother going home. The youngest runaway, Mark, claimed he’d been missing from foster care for months and had spent his 12th birthday on the run. They were glad to have found each other and for a week or so they slept together in an alleyway. Craig organised bedding. He had picked up some tips from the experienced rough sleepers, he told me, as he collected cardboard he’d stored behind a bin. “Keeps the cold off your bones,” he said, without confidence. That was his first taste of being homeless.” 6. The Undressing Scandal This month there has been global backlash to Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok, which is embedded in X, being used to create non-consensual sexualised images of people, including children. The New Yorker’s Brady Brickner-Wood explores the relationship between AI and porn, and how companies are capitalising off it. (The New Yorker, approx eight minutes reading time) “Shortly after Elon Musk purchased Twitter, in 2022, he claimed that “removing child exploitation is priority #1.” It was certainly a noble goal—social-media sites had become havens for distributing abusive materials, including child pornography and revenge porn, and there was perhaps no major platform as openly hospitable to such content as Twitter. Unlike Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, which restricted nudity and pornographic videos, Twitter allowed users to post violent and “consensually produced adult content” to their feeds without consequence. Long before Musk’s takeover, Twitter had positioned itself as anti-censorship, the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party,” as Tony Wang, the general manager of Twitter in the U.K., once put it—less concerned with policing content than with providing a public square for users to express themselves freely. But what were the limits of expression? How was Twitter to plainly determine whether an amateur pornographic video featured a sixteen-year-old or an eighteen-year-old, or if that video was consensually produced or violently coerced? Were these distinctions always so obvious?” …AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES… 7. What it’s like to live past 90 An award-winning 2014 article on one man’s experience of living past 90-years-old. The late journalist Roger Angell chronicled his honest and emotional story of being on earth for over nine decades, from watching loved ones die to finding joy in jokes. (The New Yorker, approx 22 minutes reading time) “I’ve not yet forgotten Keats or Dick Cheney or what’s waiting for me at the dry cleaner’s today. As of right now, I’m not Christopher Hitchens or Tony Judt or Nora Ephron; I’m not dead and not yet mindless in a reliable upstate facility. Decline and disaster impend, but my thoughts don’t linger there. It shouldn’t surprise me if at this time next week I’m surrounded by family, gathered on short notice—they’re sad and shocked but also a little pissed off to be here—to help decide, after what’s happened, what’s to be done with me now. It must be this hovering knowledge, that two-ton safe swaying on a frayed rope just over my head, that makes everyone so glad to see me again. “How great you’re looking! Wow, tell me your secret!” they kindly cry when they happen upon me crossing the street or exiting a dinghy or departing an X-ray room, while the little balloon over their heads reads, “Holy shit—he’s still vertical!””