WhatsApp has been in the news recently almost as much as its corporate parent, Facebook. During the recent Brazilian presidential campaign, a group of wealthy supporters of eventual winner Jair Bolsonaro purportedly paid for an army of WhatsApp shills to spread disinformation about his opponent. One outlandish piece claimed Bolsonaro’s opponent Fernando Haddad planned to distribute phallic-shaped baby bottles to children to counteract homophobia. Haddad supporters responded with their own media assault. A Brazilian fact-checking industry sprung up to counteract the rumors, and the fact checkers themselves were soon the subject of a misinformation campaign.

WhatsApp is very different than Facebook, making it a foil to the company that ingested it. To use the language of growth marketing (popular at both Facebook and WhatsApp), they’re an ‘A/B test’, a side-by-side experiment of differing conditions that (in this case) led to similar results.

First, a WhatsApp primer, largely for Americans who by and large don’t use the service. It’s a spare and minimalist mobile-messaging app, much like Apple’s iMessage or Google’s Hangouts, and much simpler than Facebook’s feature-riddled Messenger. In brief, it looks like the semester project of an ambitious mobile-development student: You can send and forward messages to people in your phone’s contact list, and create groups with them. That’s it. (More recently, it added voice and video calling.)

To those outside the WhatsApp universe, it might be hard to understand the app’s impact, or why Facebook spent $22 billion to acquire the 50-person company. Neither did I, until I moved to Spain in 2015 and soon realized I’d be a social pariah unless I became a WhatsApp user. In countries where WhatsApp reigns, the app is synonymous with phone messaging, and it is the way people talk to each other.

How did such global dominance result from such a basic app? The founders of WhatsApp seized an opportunity created by most non-US phone carriers, who charged high rates for texts. They created an app that routed texts over cheaper data connections instead. In effect, what Skype did to international calling, turning expensive calls into essentially free internet usage, WhatsApp did to SMS. And once it created a network-effect moat, there was no stopping it. Which is why Facebook had to buy it at any cost.

The Role of Groups

One key feature of WhatsApp is group messaging. Join any group activity, and you’re added to a growing group chat whose snowballing messages make your phone buzz constantly in your pocket until, in a fit of frustration, you leave the group or toggle notifications off. The feeling is that of being inside a loud bar or club where everyone is screaming at everybody. Yet, from WhatsApp’s astronomical and sustained usage, many users like living inside that noisy bar.

As a contrast to Facebook, however, WhatsApp is more important for the features is does not have. There’s no News Feed, with its mysterious and much-maligned algorithm that supposedly creates the online filter bubble that turns a user’s mind into dangerously moldable putty. WhatsApp (and Mark Zuckerberg) have no influence on what you see or read; it’s purely decided by the people you engage with.

There’s also almost no tracking of user data. Thanks to the WhatsApp founders’ cypherpunk leanings, messages on the platform are “end-to-end encrypted,” protected even from WhatsApp itself. Neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can hoover in the content of messages and tailor content or ads to that user.

Speaking of which, there are no ads. You’ll find none of the “Attention Merchants” who turn a scintilla of your attention into dollars. Nor can political candidates attempt to sway your vote via ads (at least directly). The app historically funded itself with a modest $1-per-year fee, which Facebook dropped after the acquisition.