A global analysis of the vastly popular instant messaging service Known by the popular nickname 'ZapZap' in Brazil and synonymous with the Internet across Africa and South Asia, WhatsApp has emerged as a major means of communication for millions of people around the world. Unlike social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, WhatsApp offers a closed, encrypted communication architecture that ostensibly limits the reach and exposure of shared content. While recent scholarship has drawn attention to the risks it poses to democratic systems and marginalized communities, WhatsApp in the World is the first study to offer a systematic global view of an encrypted instant messaging service. Rather than taking the technical feature of 'encryption' at face value, the volume proposes the conceptual framework of 'lived encryptions' to highlight the different, often contradictory, formations around encrypted messaging, as evidenced in the way the promised confidentiality of encrypted
