Land of the Giants: It's a WhatsApp world

The Vergecast

Vox Media Podcast Network

News, Tech News, Technology

4.4 • 4.1K Ratings

🗓️ 31 August 2022

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We're sharing an episode of Land of the Giants: The Facebook / Meta disruption, a collaboration between Recode and The Verge. Meta’s most expensive acquisition ever and one of the most used communication apps in the world: WhatsApp. With over 2 billion users, WhatsApp is embedded in the social, economic, and political infrastructure of countries across the globe. For better and worse. The story of WhatsApp’s incredible power, as told through its largest market: India. NOTE: There are descriptions of graphic acts of violence in this episode. If you want to skip these descriptions, the section begins at 20:45 and ends at 22:05. Hosted by Shirin Ghaffary (@shiringhaffary) and Alex Heath (@alexeheath) Subscribe for free. Be the first to hear next week's episode by hitting the plus sign in your favorite podcast app Follow @recode and @verge for more coverage of Meta and Big Tech Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of unattractive messaging apps.
0:03.9	I'm your friend David Pierce and we are technically off today, but I wanted to play you instead of
0:09.0	just not having an episode, an episode of a podcast called Land of the Giants, which hopefully
0:13.7	you're listening to. But if not, this season, The Land of the Giants is all about Facebook and
0:18.5	Meta. The shows, a collaboration between Ricod and the Verge and Shereem Gafari and Alex Heath
0:23.2	have been exploring how Facebook, eventually Meta, have changed the way that we live our lives
0:28.8	both on and off the internet. The last episode of the season dropped today. The whole series is great,
0:34.0	you should listen to all of it. But I wanted to play you an episode that's actually the second
0:37.4	to last episode in the season, all about WhatsApp. WhatsApp is absolutely fascinating. It's massive
0:43.2	and it changes the way that people live their lives in ways many of us, especially in the US,
0:48.4	where WhatsApp is not as popular, don't even understand. So again, you should listen to the whole
0:52.4	series, but I think this episode stands pretty well on its own. This is Land of the Giants.
1:05.1	You probably don't remember where you were on October 4th 2021.
1:09.5	Tonight, major outages affecting billions of users of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp,
1:14.8	all of it starting this morning and continuing through the day. All three apps went offline at the
1:20.3	same time around the world. In convenience, Doom's scrollers on Facebook and Instagram switched over
1:26.2	to other platforms. So much so that the official Twitter account tweeted out, hello, literally everyone.
1:34.3	But for Regif Kira, WhatsApp going down was a much bigger deal. We never thought WhatsApp would be
1:40.0	down for so long. The official shutdown lasted for about six hours, but the effects lingered in a few
1:45.9	places, such as India, which meant enormous consequences for people like Kira. WhatsApp is his
1:52.8	livelihood. He founded a food tech business called Chaki piecing outside New Delhi, India,
1:58.0	that delivers freshly milled flour and spices to people and he runs it primarily on WhatsApp.
	...

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