Category: SignalCategory: Signal

According to Ken Klippenstein, “the government is building a sociological profile of political discontent.”

Homeland security field agents are scouring the social media site Reddit, monitoring the communications of law-abiding Americans critical of the agency.

And if they’re scouring sites like Reddit, you know damn well they’re scouring Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and everywhere else.

Raziq Rauf from Running Sucks wrote about how some running clubs are choosing to not post about their events on social media because they don’t want to tip off ICE.

“I learned about all these run clubs from Instagram, but we’re doing a new thing where if you wanna get with South Central Run Club, you have to be in our Signal chat. South Central deals with hyper-policing. Most of our runners are Black and brown and you never know when ICE is gonna pull up. Instead of broadcasting our runs and making us vulnerable to surveillance, we stopped putting it on Instagram to make people feel safer to come and hang out.“

Exercising our legal right to free speech and protest (or just run with our friends) is hard without some of these digital tools, especially when those tools are owned by the very forces we oppose, but as Priya Parker says, “connection is the antidote to fascism.”

Meta is gonna do what Meta is gonna do, adding advertisements to WhatsApp: “ads built with privacy in mind.” Apparently it’s only in the Updates Tab, but as John Gruber says, “does anyone believe they’re not going to put ads in the other tabs sooner or later?”

Good discussion ensues on HackerNews about how folks have moved away from WhatsApp:

“I moved my family over to Signal years ago. Anyone new who wants to message me, I simply say “I’m on Signal” and if it’s important enough, they go and install it.”

Read the full thread here.