• One false positive is plausible; twice is uncanny; thrice you’d swear is intentional.

Combine Ian Fleming’s “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action” with Stafford Beer’s “The purpose of a system is what it does,” and the conclusion I come to with WhatsApp’s overtuned spam filter is that it’s meant to be overtuned.

I, like every postgraduate offer-holder in the St. Andrews Uni waiting room, received an invite to a WhatsApp group via email. There were no alternatives – at least, not that I could find. At first, I didn’t want to join. On principle, I do not use any of Meta’s platforms. It’s not just because any claims it makes about security and privacy are (mostly) performative:

https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/01/27/whatsapp-and-the-domestication-of-users

It’s not just because Facebook was, and still is, the site that was founded to non-consensually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and only got worse after that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT1ud0rAT7w&t=363

It’s not even just because Mark Zuckerberg’s idea of competition is akin to buying properties in Monopoly – or, as more pithily put by fellow anti-democracy bagman Peter Thiel, “competition is for losers:”

https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/its-better-to-buy-than-compete-the-ftc-is-using-mark-zuckerbergs-own-words-against-him-read-the-facebook-ceos-crucial-emails-here-/articleshow/79666677.cms

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21345723/facebook-instagram-documents-emails-mark-zuckerberg-kevin-systrom-hearing

And it’s not even because the very name ‘WhatsApp’ has all the wit and charm of, ‘The US may have the silicon chip, but we have the silicon chap (and of course, chapesses):’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei9iM_zzzQk

But when your university offers you a WhatsApp group, and ONLY a WhatsApp group, to communicate with your fellow offer-holders, it’s pretty hard to flat-out refuse. If I didn’t join, I’d be starting Uni without having gotten to know anyone, so I’d be socially disadvantaged further; my joining WhatsApp is not an acceptance of anything other than this is where my peers are. As per that immortal phrase uttered by Hermann Melville’s Bartleby: “I would prefer not to:”

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11231/pg11231-images.html

“Prefer not to,” echoed I, rising in high excitement, and crossing the room with a stride. “What do you mean? Are you moon-struck? I want you to join this WhatsApp group here– take it,” and I thrust the link towards him.
“I would prefer not to,” said he.

WhatsApp has been doing a pretty fucking good job of preventing me from talking to the people I need to talk to. I have given it a phone number, and a photo, and in theory, that should be all that’s required to start talking. And yet, for the past week, I have been blocked on WhatsApp for “spam” – not once, not twice, but THREE times:

https://geekdom.social/@bigolifacks/112638603606986660

https://geekdom.social/@bigolifacks/112661119115733884

If I was an intrusion detection system, my best guess is that my account’s naissance, my infrequent posting, and the length of my posts raise three flags that shouldn’t be raised in tandem.

It’s as if new users are being tested to see how much they can endure being blocked. “Want to talk to your friends? Pass our filter first. We pinky-swear we’ll not accidentally permaban you. Yes, we need it for spammers – how else would we protect you?” Perhaps that’s a feature of overcorrection, and not a bug. It’s meant to make you feel desperate enough to lock in (like me), whilst turning away those who only intend to use it for a short time (also like me).

One false positive is plausible; twice is uncanny; thrice you’d swear is intentional.

Consider a similar example. If you are an Amazon Prime subscriber, you probably found it a doozy. As for unsubscribing? The US’s Federal Trade Commission has tried, and found that Amazon makes it egregiously more difficult – not quite the thirteenth labour of Heracles, but Sisyphus would stop rolling his boulder for a minute to say, “Thank the gods I don’t have to do that”:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.323520/gov.uscourts.wawd.323520.1.0_1.pdf

The purpose of a system is what it does. Per its privacy policy, a name and phone number is all that’s needed to get talking on WhatsApp, which I have provided. Yet it consistently fails to tell me, a well-meaning new user, apart from a legitimate threat actor:

https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/privacy-policy?lang=en#privacy-policy-information-we-collect

Do they want an email from me? My home address? I could sent shit to them in the mail – would that be OK for a stool sample? Will they keep squeezing me for more info they’re not entitled to – again, as per their privacy policy – until I yield?

Oh, wait, hang on a moment. I can hear keyboards a-clattering… I think someone’s going to fall for my trap card…

https://donotreply.cards/en/do-not-tell-me-you-dont-have-this-problem

Do not also tell me that I should just suck it up, just use WhatsApp and stop complaining, because that’s what all Big Tech companies do anyway, isn’t it? Sell our private data off to advertisers?

1. You’ve triggered another trap card:

https://donotreply.cards/en/do-not-reply-to-deny-my-lived-experience

And 2. I have no truck with privacy nihilism, and with all due respect, please educate yourself, or get out of the road:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/02/privacy-isnt-dead-far-it

https://medium.com/@evanselinger/stop-saying-privacy-is-dead-513dda573071

There is an alternative here. I want a choice. I want to talk to my friends no matter what platforms we use. When I leave a platform, I want to take those connections with me:

https://brologue.net/2023/11/15/i-want-my-twitter-friends-back

I will continue to be blocked by WhatsApp’s spam filter until I am not (hopefully). And then I’m going to do something about it. If WhatsApp makes it so difficult for users to leave for other platforms, I’m going to bring those platforms to WhatsApp users. Using the Matrix protocol, I can create groupsin WhatsApp, Discord, Signal, Telegram, etc., and bridge them together:

https://joinmatrix.org

It is far from my ideal solution¹, and I’ll have to pay out of pocket to host a domain and VPS to do it, but it’s the principle of the thing. What I’ve been through is a pernickety kind of petty bullshit that no-one should have to go through. I shouldn’t have to join WhatsApp to talk to my peers – and neither should you.

BM to Meta: eat shit, and break up.

(Image: Skelanard, CC BY-SA 4.0)

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1. For me, the aims of federation enable a means to an end, and that end looks something like Veilid:
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb1lKscAMDQ ↩︎