WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging apps across the world, and it"s still growing continually. In the quarterly earnings call on Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that WhatsApp is now delivering close to 100 billion messages each day (via TechCrunch). The Head of WhatsApp at Facebook, Will Cathcart, later confirmed this in a tweet.
This year we"ve all relied on messaging more than ever to keep up with our loved ones and get business done. We are proud that @WhatsApp is able to deliver roughly 100B messages every day and we"re excited about the road ahead.
— Will Cathcart (@wcathcart) October 29, 2020
On the last New Year"s Eve, a figure of 100 billion texts was the zenith of engagement figures for the instant messaging app. But engagement has grown significantly since then to reach the average figure of 100 billion a day today. For perspective, back in 2014, WhatsApp exchanged 50 billion texts a day with a user base of 500 million. Six years later, WhatsApp now has over two billion users with India being its biggest market in terms of users.
With this level of information exchange, curbing the spread of disinformation becomes an important task. WhatsApp has been cracking on down on it in the past. Back in August, it launched a new tool called ‘Search the web’ that allows users to quickly find information about received links from the web. The app also limited the forwarding of "highly forwarded" messages to just one person or group at a time. This directly resulted in a 70% reduction in the forwarding of such messages, arguably slowing down the spread of misleading information on the platform as well.