Affordance is power: contradictions between communicational and technical dimensions of WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption

Abstract

The present study analyses critically the roll-out of the end-to-end encryption on WhatsApp, supported by Affordances Theory, guided by the “platform biography” framework that points to a historical perspective of the App. After pointing out the contradictions with evidences from the empirical work, we conclude that the implementation of such affordance should be interpreted as a strategic move inscribed in: (i) a guerrilla Public Relations war between WhatsApp Inc. against national states in which is revealed (ii) a power move by the digital media corporation to avoid political conflicts with them and that (iii) a cost-benefit approach leads to the prevalence of commercial massiveness at the expense of technological utopia.