The launch upends its founders’ original mission of creating an app with ‘No Ads! No Games! No Gimmicks!’ This week, WhatsApp did something its founders said it would never do: it’s putting advertisements inside the app. It ends WhatsApp’s decade-plus run of offering an ad-free messaging and calling experience.

As the company explains in its blog post, these ads will appear in WhatsApp's Instagram Stories-like Status feature. %

End-to-end encryption is still guaranteed, and Meta also said that if users only use the app to call or message their contacts, there will be “no change to [the] experience at all,” though for many, this promise simply isn’t enough.

Meta Platforms Inc., the owner of Facebook and Instagram, is pushing deeper into AI-generated advertisements in a bid to make it cheaper and simpler for marketers to craft their messages.

Meta Platforms said it’s introducing paid advertising to WhatsApp, in a move that could expand its revenue streams.

After the tech giant announced it would begin to include ads in WhatsApp’s Updates tab, which is used by roughly 1.5 million people per day, Signal president Meredith Whittaker took to X to lure users to her messaging tool: “Use Signal,” she wrote. “We promise, no AI clutter, no surveillance ads—whatever the rest of the industry does.”

Meta is suing a company for an app that allows people to create Ai-generate nudes or sexually explicit images without their consent, the social media company said Thursday.

Key Takeaways Shares of Meta Platforms got a boost Monday as the tech giant announced plans to introduce paid advertising to WhatsApp, opening up a new revenue stream. After reclaiming the 50- and 200-day moving averages,