Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg’s feud has made headlines before, but a new round of criticism from Musk’s end has added fuel to the fire. In his latest swipe, Musk mocked the Facebook founder with a meme that soon went viral.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Musk posted an image with Zuckerberg that suggests Meta is spying on WhatsApp users. He described the image as “Reminds me of this classic meme”.
The billionaire businessman made the comments in response to another tweet that said former Meta suppliers had claimed that company employees could read WhatsApp chats despite promises of encryption, and that US officials were now investigating the matter.
It also advised users to switch to X chat from WhatsApp, claiming it was a safer alternative to the messaging app. X Chat is marketed as a privacy-focused messaging feature owned by Musk.
“Use X Chat instead of WhatsApp! VX Chat will never be ‘ad hooks,'” he wrote in the post.
Musk also previously said that WhatsApp is “not secure” and claimed that even Signal is questionable. The latter is also marketed as a privacy-focused app backed by whistleblowers like Edward Snowden.
Meta, which acquired WhatsApp in 2014, has made end-to-end encryption a central part of WhatsApp’s feature set, offering the kind of encryption that means text is only accessible to the sender and recipient, not the company.
WhatsApp denies the claims of the US investigation
US law enforcement agencies are investigating allegations by former Meta Platform suppliers that Meta officials have access to other users’ WhatsApp messages, according to a Bloomberg report.
Last year, two people who worked as content moderators for WhatsApp told an investigator with Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security that some Meta employees had access to the content of WhatsApp’s personal messages, the agency said.
However, WhatsApp and Meta executives have consistently denied these allegations. In X’s post retweeting the development, the company said the reports were “false” and that the US Industry and Security Administration had distanced itself from the “alleged” investigation.
The company also claimed that the government body had dismissed the claims of its own employees as baseless. “What these individuals claim is not possible because WhatsApp, including vendors, does not have access to people’s encrypted communications,” the statement said.
