“On WhatsApp I say what I want”: Messaging apps,diaspora communities,and networked counterpublics in the United States

Abstract

Critical scholars have assessed conceptualizations of “the public sphere” with a focus on contestation and plurality for several years. Recent studies comment on how specific social media platforms lend themselves to the creation of networked (counter)publics. This study advances related understandings by outlining how diaspora communities in the United States use encrypted messaging apps (EMAs) to create networked counterpublics. We leverage data from 71 interviews with diaspora community members alongside conceptualizations from Fraser, Squires, Baym, and boyd. We outline how these digital groups are veiled from the wider public by design, language, and perception. We explain how they rely on humor and multimediality for the interpretation of political developments. This is critical to hypothesis generation and future work, as the inherent subversiveness of encrypted communication could nurture potentials for democratic inclusiveness against the backdrop of multiplicity.

Introduction

Scholars of critical communication and sociology have been assessing conceptualizations of “the public sphere” with a focus on contestation and plurality for several years (Calhoun, 1993; Ferree et al., 2002). However, the continuous—and extremely rapid—development of new technologies demands ongoing focus upon these dynamics as they relate to competition in the public sphere (Dahlgren, 2009; Lunt and Livingstone, 2013; Pfister, 2018). The prerogative of meaning making, or framing, surrounding ongoing developments is intrinsically linked to power relations in any given society (Benford and Snow, 2000). When platforms like Facebook and Twitter entered the media fray and disrupted existing structures of authority, the hope was that a more diverse set of voices would emerge—and that this would ultimately lead to a more inclusive public sphere (Fuchs, 2015; Schrape, 2016).

In the United States, popular social media platforms have largely disappointed in this regard. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, among the most popular social media platforms by absolute user numbers and frequently relied on for news consumption (Atske, 2021; Newman, 2017), have proven to privilege some users’ voices over others (Oversight Board, 2022). They also frequently promote hazardous content (Picardo et al., 2020) and weaken fringe voices by “over-penalizing” the speech of marginalized communities (Yee et al., 2022). However, there are another set of platforms that have developed into main avenues for communication, news sharing and content creation globally (Valeriani and Vaccari, 2018) and are understudied in these terms. Their impacts upon the flow of communication also have repercussions for US public life: encrypted messaging apps (EMAs), such as Telegram, WhatsApp, and WeChat (Kuru et al., 2022; Rossini et al., 2021; Scherman et al., 2022; Sun and Yu, 2020).

Given the fundamentally different platform features of EMAs in comparison to more studied “mainstream” platforms, their potential functions for the public sphere are also markedly different. Our research on EMAs and diaspora communities reveals a critical shift in the way those communities in the United States engage with news and, therefore, with public life—aligning with scholarship that argues community-driven media empowers marginalized groups (Appadurai, 1990; Srinivasan, 2006). Crucially, any functioning democracy needs a space between the market and the state to thematize, problematize, and address the challenges of society—and resilient public spheres are characterized by hospitality to counterpublics.

While EMAs are less widely used in the United States than in other parts of the world, the Pew Research Center reports importance of WhatsApp among US Hispanic users (46% use) compared with white users (16%) (Auxier and Anderson, 2021). In a recent survey, US adults found that WhatsApp was popular among Hispanics, Asians, and people who identified with two or more racial/ethnic categories—and much less so with white people (Woolley et al., 2021). A similar survey of Cuban American, Mexican American, and Indian American WhatsApp users found that a significant percentage used WhatsApp for political discussion (Riedl et al., 2022).

EMAs are often discussed in terms of their convenience for text messaging. Other explanations for their popularity relate to communication with friends and family around the world. We focus on their success as “meso-news spaces” (Tenenboim and Kligler-Vilenchik, 2020). Among diaspora communities in the United States, these environments offer an alternative to what is considered the majority-dominated public discourse. They have the potential to cultivate “subaltern counterpublics,” which can inspire more confidence or trust among communities that have been historically marginalized (Fraser, 1990). We detail theorizations of the modern public sphere in relation to EMAs and diaspora communities in the United States. We present three related themes: openness for the community, veiled communications, and multimediality/humor. We forefront the importance of specific technical features and limitations of EMAs. We outline how EMAs are tied to the creation of counterpublics by diaspora communities, aiding in the generation of hypotheses and future work as the inherent subversiveness of encrypted communication could nurture potentials for democratic inclusiveness against the backdrop of multiplicity, by allowing for a plurality of contesting publics (Fraser, 1990; Mouffe, 2000).

For the purposes of this work, we use the term “diaspora communities” to include people who told us that they regularly use EMAs to communicate with people in their country of origin, where their family is from, with individuals who share their cultural context, or with people living in the United States identifying with the same community. While this approach risks over-including individuals who are not part of identical communities, the connecting thread for our research is the usage of these apps paired with self-identification (citation withheld). Overall, this definition aligns Johnson’s (2012: 42), view that “diaspora studies move[d] beyond theories of transnational migration” and toward a focus on how (1) groups “self-identify as belonging to the diaspora communities (and eventually formulate a new movement based on this identity)” and (2) the ways in which people connect beyond a host country or home country and connect with each other.

Literature review

The public sphere and its critics

Among the strongest criticisms of early conceptualizations of the public sphere was its normative overtone, which structurally privileged certain parts of the population over others (Eley, 1990; Fine, 2010; Fraser, 1989; Ikegami, 2000)—since the emphasis on consensus finding ultimately attributes power to majorities (Fraser, 1992: 128). While the “rational-critical debate” was supposed to be radical by removing hereditary social status, Habermas himself recognized the cruciality of diverse identities and, therefore, the legitimacy of multiple forms and sites of deliberation with varying power, partially removing the priority of consensus (Bohman, 2004).

Thanks to prolific scholarship exploring the multiplicity of publics and counterpublics, “the public sphere” is a now commonly understood as contested (Sarangi and Coulthard, 2014). This affects minority communities, who often differentiate themselves from the “rational-critical debate” of dominant publics through contrastive dispositions, varying styles, and tactics to influence public attention (Squires, 2002). “Counterpublics” is used to refer to partially organized publics of individuals and/or groups whose—individual or group—identity consigns their public contributions to an “inferior position vis-à-vis the wider and dominant public” (Fiig, 2011: 136). Hence, counterpublics are marginalized, subaltern, subordinated publics (Fraser, 2019; Warner, 2021).

Finally, Internet research has nurtured a plethora of studies that assess how specific platforms (or platform features) lend themselves to the creation of (counter)publics (Elsheikh and Lilleker, 2021; Wang, 2022). Boyd (2010), Cho (2018) and Renninger (2015) advance scholarly understandings of how emergent technologies and specific platforms alter existing understandings of publics and counterpublics—leading to conceptualizations of networked publics (boyd, 2010) and networked counterpublics (Cho, 2018; Renninger, 2015) via which “networked technologies reorganize how information flows and how people interact with information and each other” (boyd, 2010: 41). Studies show how communities defined by race, gender and sexuality create and influence subaltern discussions and networks against hateful discourses over many platforms—with a focus on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (Gutiérrez, 2022; Jackson et al., 2018; Marwick and boyd, 2011; Trott, 2021).

Crucial to related studies is the critical evaluation of previous lines that were drawn between “the public” and “the private” (Fraser, 1990). Baym and boyd (2012) explain how networked technologies are used in myriad ways to negotiate the public and the private—parsing out differences between audiences and publics to demonstrate how social media blurs such concepts. Audiences, generally conceived of as in the private sphere, are no longer so private when they become active participants. While similar dynamics have occurred before, social media exacerbated this context collapse (Baym and boyd, 2012; Brandtzaeg and Lüders, 2018). Cho (2018) argues that Tumblr is a queer space that disrupts the “default publicness” of other social media spaces—it can be thought of as a networked counterpublic (whereas Facebook or Twitter are primarily conceivable for networked publics). These insights are pivotal to the study of more private platforms like EMAs in relation to (counter)publics.

Existing research on information technologies and diasporas has outlined how such tools allowed for “rapid mobility of information and power to nontraditional spheres.” (Johnson, 2012: 43) These technological developments changed both the origins and the processes of migration (Lie, 1995). “Nontraditional spheres” include diasporas, for Johnson: “groups of migrants originating from the same homeland who have formed transnational movements.” We follow related understandings of diasporas as politically influential because they exercise influence on politics around the globe—in their country of origin but also country of residence—based on loose networks (Arnold, 2011). We focus on infrastructural possibilities therein, looking at whether the diaspora communities using EMAs can be understood via Appadurai’s “diasporic public spheres” (Morley, 2011). Specifically, we examine the potential of EMAs for the formation of counterpublics and political talk among minority communities in the United States.

EMAs and their communicative and societal roles

Existing scholarship on EMAs can be clustered around three main themes when specifically looking for the communicative roles of EMAs related to political talk: first, political science work focused on their effect on political participation; second, communication studies primarily focused on their role in the manipulation of public opinion; and third, broader Internet scholarship examining technical features’ political (non-)impact.

Scherman et al. define EMAs like WhatsApp as “strong-tied social media which are generally homogeneous [and] formed by close people” (2022: 78). They show that the use of platforms with strong ties is related to non-conventional political participation. Critically, they distinguish between access routes to political information (or “news”) and varying impacts depending on whether strong or weak networks are involved. For many, regularly accessing the information needed for forming a political opinion and making decisions on (non-)action can be overwhelming (Pang and Woo, 2020). What is more, because political discussions are not of interest to all citizens, “short-cuts” like receiving political information from a friend or family member (Ladini et al., 2020) can be convenient and seen as “more reliable than mass media and messages from politicians” (Huckfeldt et al., 2004: 71).

Communication scholars emphasize that these apps are designed for more private communication and argue, therefore, that they enable communication between existing, trusted networks of people with close ties to one another (Correa and Valenzuela, 2021; Espinosa et al., 2021). This more intimate information space can allow for manipulation via relational organizing—for potent content that begins as disinformation and is eventually spread as misinformation via friends and family (Gursky et al., 2022). EMAs can enable political manipulation efforts (Rossini et al., 2021), targeted forms of disinformation (de Freitas Melo et al., 2020) and hate speech (Giusti and Iannàccaro, 2020).

Finally, scholars have started to concentrate on how EMA’s technical features influence the apps’ political (non-)impact (Caetano et al., 2018). Chadwick et al. (2023: 2) conclude that social relationships merge with specific technical features (such as encryption) on apps like WhatsApp and foster a “norm of conflict avoidance”—which resultingly contributes to the spread of misinformation. By specifically including end-to-end encrypted messaging into their analysis, Bhanaji and Bhat (2019: 22) show how this feature nurtures a “civic trust” that WhatsApp users in India attribute to the platform. Therefore, the encryption of messages and the peer-to-peer nature of the networks are crucial affordances of the platform and others like it. Such features are critically tied to usage patterns but also communicative adoption and related political effects of EMAs including, related to our focus, in the United States.

In sum, EMAs have moved into scholarly focus in the political communication field as a new “semi-public space,” due to dynamics of increased popularity and user growth. Unique features of these apps also offer novel means of access to news and interpersonal political discussion due to their more fluid conversational setting, where exchanges can include texts, audio, videos, images, and/or links (Matassi et al., 2019; Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2021). In their latest “Digital News Report,” Newman et al. (2021) show that users are more likely to take part in private discussions about the news through WhatsApp than Facebook.

EMAs, diaspora communities and networked counterpublics in the United States

Building upon previous scholarship, we define a networked diasporic counterpublic as an alternative, semi-private network that emphasizes EMAs as important for connections and through which they discuss and interpret issues of relevance to them. They also use EMAs to create a sense of dominant political developments related to the wider public. We contribute to scholarship on networked counterpublics in three ways: First, we introduce EMAs as relevant platforms for the creation of counterpublics in the United States; second, we show how diasporic counterpublics on EMAs are veiled from the wider public by design, language and perception (Squires, 2002); third, we examine the confluence of private and public and emerging counterpublic communication (Baym and boyd, 2012; Jackson and Foucault Welles, 2015). Johns (2020) conceptualizes EMAs as “crypto-publics (. . .) new publics (. . .) which connect the formation of current activist publics and other political mobilisations on WhatsApp to the development and uses of encryption and open source software by crypto-activists.” In our case, it is not activists who deliberately create safe spaces but instead a combination of EMAs and a range of community users that nurture the creation of networked diasporic counter-publics.

With this, we align with Fraser’s (1989: 77) definition of counterpublics as spaces of discourse and action that can, and should, be held to the normative standards of inclusion and efficacy within the broader socio-political world. To assess whether diaspora communities create counterpublics via EMAs, we merge Fraser’s characteristic of counterpublics as (a) open to the participation of “all citizens” (2019: 155) with Squires’ proposition that they are (b) enclaves where internal talk is veiled from the wider public. Finally, we align (c) with Fiig (2011: 293) who argues that an opinion formation counterpublic enables “a range of democratic potentials in relation to democracy and citizenship practice.” In other words, the existence of multiple publics or counterpublics, whatever their capability, is crucial for democracy. This article is also hypothesis generating as the inherent subversiveness of encrypted communication could nurture potentials for democratic inclusiveness against the backdrop of multiplicity, by allowing for a plurality of contesting publics—with conceptually advancing existing scholarship on messaging apps (Tenenboim and Kligler-Vilenchik, 2020; Zhu et al., 2022).

Studying “diaspora communities” in the United States

Researchers often encounter particular obstacles when attempting to study EMAs as these apps are designed for private communication and established processes of quantitative or open-source data gathering are futile (Resende et al., 2019). Furthermore, communication via EMAs is seen as private and research about conversations on those platforms is quickly considered intrusive (Nguyễn et al., 2022). Meanwhile, research on digital platforms in the United States tends to focus on Twitter and Meta platforms, but other social media platforms, like EMAs, have higher relevance for diaspora communities (Abu Arqoub et al., 2022). Our research therefore follows a qualitative, interview-based study which allows for “screen walks” in which interviewees explain the dynamics of the groups they participate in as well as field work alongside respondents aimed at understanding socio-cultural elements of platform use and trust.

Instead of basing the study on sociologically deterministic inclusion/exclusion criteria, such as certain age or nationality, this study follows well-established conceptualizations by Anderson in which the nation is an “imagined political community” (Anderson, 2006). For people with immigrant background in the United States, this means they engage in processes of how to fit in to this imagined communities (or not).

We study Chinese, Cuban, Indian, Mexican and Venezuelan Americans for two reasons: (1) the communicative political importance of EMAs for those communities, and (2) the political importance of these communities for future US politics/US democracy. First, EMAs are important for communication in all five diaspora communities. While data from the companies on user demographics in the United States is non-existent, other survey literature shows the importance of EMAs to our five communities (see Supplemental Appendix).

While EMAs vary in significance among different generations within the communities, the importance of them as a binding factor inside the United States but also as medium for transnational communication keeping ties with family and friends abroad is vital for all five communities. We also acknowledge the different usage dynamics surrounding EMAs, but the unifying feature is how the platforms themselves emphasize privacy and how this is perceived by community members.

Second, these five diaspora communities have been identified as crucial demographics for swinging future US elections. We spoke specifically to groups with increased voter turnout during the 2020 presidential election in areas with rapidly growing diaspora populations—cities in which the combined population of Hispanic populations and residents with Asian heritage make up 65% or more of the living population include Houston, Miami, and San Antonio (Cai and Fessenden, 2020). We focus on one community in each of these cities and the informational habits, needs, and issues that people encounter while discussing politics through EMAs.

In line with previous scholarship, this study relies on qualitative, semi-structured interviews with community members active on EMAs to garner free-flowing insight from interviewees (Kallio et al., 2016). The interviewees were adults between 18 and 68 years who fulfilled our criteria. Interviewees were recruited via email or direct message. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish between February 2022 and November 2022 in person or via online. We first contacted community leaders and then relied on snowball sampling (Galletta, 2013) to expand our corpus. Conversations lasted 30–90 minutes.

Referencing interview recordings, interview memos were written following each interview to summarize key takeaways (Smith, 1995) and structured around the questionnaire’s five topics (for more see Supplemental Appendix). Most interviews were carried out by two or three researchers, and therefore, memos and notes were triangulated between researchers. Interviews were analyzed using open coding, via which we allowed theory to emerge from close readings of the data (Sarker et al., 2000). This research does not focus on content, but on the structural implications of news sharing and political talk among diaspora communities on EMAs.

Findings

Open to participation of all citizens

Crucially for the creation of counterpublics, EMAs are open to all. A 19-year-old Indian American student expressed: “It [WhatsApp] is just like iMessage (. . .) everyone has it (. . .) it’s almost like it comes with the phone.” A 50-year-old Chinese American technologist added,

WeChat being free is super important (. . .) I don’t understand how the apps make money (. . .) [but] that we can call and text and send videos for free everywhere was amazing when I first got WeChat (. . .) it’s still important.

Such structural conditions are the backdrop of the emergence of networked diasporic counterpublics. Critically, though, is the perception among community members that WhatsApp is different from the “default publicness” (Cho, 2018) of other social media spaces. A 22-year-old Indian American student explained,

Honestly if it weren’t for my [Indian American] parents, I wouldn’t have gotten WhatsApp (. . .) [but] actually now I use it a lot. I never speak about politics on Insta (. . .) it’s so exposed [but] WhatsApp is different. Like it feels protected (. . .) we can talk about how Modi is radicalizing Indians. I know America wants India to oppose the war in Ukraine, I don’t care about that so much (. . .) [but] I want America to hold Modi accountable for his racism. [On WhatsApp] we are talking how we can achieve that.

A basis is created that facilitates a “counterpublic in both orientation and discourse” (Berlant and Warner, 1998) since EMAs are theoretically open but engagement on the platforms is defined by users who are aware of their “inferior position vis-à-vis the wider and dominant public” (Breese, 2011: 136). The quoted interviewee explained this when he self-assigned the discourse around US politics toward Indian Prime Minister Modi on WhatsApp as subordinated to mainstream American interests.

Veiled from the wider public by design, language, and perception

While access to EMAs is understood as basically universal, the ways in which diaspora community members communicate via the platform are “veiled from the wider public” (Squires, 2002) because users exert different layers of control with regard to their networks and conversations. For example, users can leave groups—and once they do that group’s content can be deleted and disappears from the user’s app. Individual users can be blocked. This effectively manages which chats are displayed in the app, and therefore, the sources from which users receive content from. This is very different from Facebook or YouTube, where users have more limited means of content control due to targeted suggestions and ads. A 27-year-old Indian American student explained how he curated WhatsApp to work for him:

Ok so FB, Insta I have deleted many times because I don’t like social media but WhatsApp (. . .) it’s too integral, I cannot delete it (. . .) [but] I kind of have created my own WhatsApp, almost like my own algorithm: I archive many chats, I mute others (. . .) I pin chats.

In addition, group administrators can kick people out of the group. While joining the group is not always in the users’ control, and group moderators have limited control over the content shared in groups, group membership can be controlled both by an individual user (deciding to leave, mute chats or block people) as well as the group administrator. The latter can “simply take people in and out and set up a new group” or “only allow posting for themselves,” as a 31-year-old Indian American engineer explained. ¹

Second, and related to these perceptions of individual control, is the perceived intimacy diaspora community members experience when using EMAs. This perceived intimacy forms due to (a) the platform design which forefronts encryption and individual chats (one-on-one or group chats) but also because (b) diaspora community members associate EMAs with their community and actively engage with them there. These patterns are particularly strong among the Chinese Americans we interviewed. A 46-year-old stay-at-home mom said that “Chinese parents like to have [WeChat] groups for really everything.” A 19-year-old student said that Chinese Americans “default to WeChat.” WeChat communications operate largely in Chinese: A 50-year-old architect explained that “at least 90%” of her WeChat communication is in Chinese. She said she uses WhatsApp for coordination with non-Chinese parents of her daughter’s school: “That’s the international app.” A 19-year-old student added: “All our WeChat communication is in Chinese (. . .) if I didn’t speak any Chinese, no way I would be on that app.”

Due to the perceived intra-community communication on the different apps, diaspora community members expressed their conviction that they can talk about topics on those apps, which they would not address on other social media. But crucially, these are topics that matter for them and which they see as defining for them in the broader US discourse. For example, Cuban American and Venezuelan American interviewees expressed that they talk on EMAs about their fear of communism without fearing judgment from the majority US population: “Fear of communism is really our no.1 topic (. . .) [but] outside the community people don’t understand that,” a 67-year-old Cuban American explained. A 30-year-old Cuban American policy maker underlined the importance of EMAs for veiled communication specifically when saying:

On WhatsApp it’s [political discussion] hidden you know. I am careful with what I put on Twitter but on WhatsApp we discuss and organize in secret. Now that I say it, it sounds dangerous but that’s not what I mean (. . .) we need a safe space to talk—in our language and without being judged.

We found similar sentiments across all diaspora communities we interviewed.

Mexican Americans we interviewed emphasized the sensitivity around immigration-related topics. For example, a 21-year-old student in San Antonio explained that on WhatsApp, she only talks with people she is close to, that immigration is always a big issue, she feels that people misunderstand Mexicans, and her community needs to protect themselves against a Mexican threat narrative. But also, on EMAs, skepticism can remain, like the grandmother of a 20-year-old student trying to keep her granddaughter from talking about politics on WhatsApp as she is “paranoid about privacy or someone screenshotting my messages.” Finally, dynamics from the community’s countries of origin play in as well. For example, a 30-year old project manager explained to us that in Mexico “people don’t trust journalists, they rely on community for information (. . .) [and] this happens on WhatsApp (. . .) so we do the same in the US.”

Indian American interviewees pointed out that they are comfortable talking about casteism, Hindu–Muslim relations and Anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States on WhatsApp but need this intra-community exchange first before discussing/breaking their opinions on these topics into other social media platforms. “I know casteism is bad (. . .) also here in America (. . .) so we discuss it on WhatsApp, but it looks bad on Indian Americans,” a 19-year-old student summarized. With regard to Asian hate crimes, interviewees were convinced that drawing attention to this would generate little sympathy from other Americans but instead designate them as part of “problem communities.” A 20-year-old student remembered a video of an Indian American getting choked in Dallas circulating on WhatsApp which led to discussions about the incident and American politics, but she did not mention or discuss this video with anyone outside her community.

For Chinese Americans, Asian hate crimes and COVID-19 travel policies have been prevalent topics over WeChat recently. Interviewees said they feel these conversations alienate them from the majority US population. They expressed how WeChat gives them a safe space to exchange news links and speak freely: “A lot of conversations [on WeChat] are centered around Asian hate crimes (. . .) and how the Asian community is affected (. . .) the shootings that are happening,” a 20-year-old explained. And a 47-year-old pharmacist who moved to the United States when she was five asked:

Is it silly that I think on WeChat we are protected because it’s all in Chinese? The platform feels safe (. . .) I think many topics I see there would be dangerous to discuss on Facebook or something (. . .) everyone is one Facebook [and there] you have the translation option, so no WeChat is safe for us [Chinese Americans].

Relying on humor and multimediality for the interpretation of political developments

Political talk among diaspora communities on EMAs is defined by two main aspects: first, the confluence of political conversations with private topics, such as introducing political topics into small family group chats and second, the multimediality of political talk, such as the importance of memes, stickers, videos and voice messages—with this outlining how counterpublics behave differently (Warner, 2021).

A 22-year-old Indian American student explained to us how his family group chat, which consists of his parents, one grandparent, and two siblings occasionally discusses politics, but these are “more chill conversations.” This is different than the political discussion he has in school sometimes because “it’s just more heated (. . .) I don’t know what other people are thinking and how their families tick and how their background and everything plays in (. . .) I just stay quiet there,” or a 20-year-old Mexican American student who described how talking about politics on WhatsApp has “never turned into a huge fight” because its among people who know each other. A 20-year-old Indian American student added that “[On WhatsApp] they’re not going to send information to create arguments.”

Similarly, the confluence of political conversations with private topics, such as introducing political topics into small family group chats was explained by two Mexican American students in San Antonio: Juan (pseudonym) told us how shared news articles are not as important as the accompanying text or memes: “It’s more of like the resulting discussion than reading articles that matters” and those discussion are built around humor, such as teasing each other about “Who’s gonna get deported first?” Resultingly, he also says that he does not consider himself as “being into politics (. . .) because the majority of the time we are talking about a lot of stupid stuff (. . .) [but] yeah maybe politics is actually part of that” or Priscilla (pseudonym) who said that political conversations in her small family group chats are often triggered after sending funny memes or stickers of Trump, which her family would only reluctantly discuss more publicly.

The Chinese American data distinguishes itself from the other communities in this regard as there is a general understanding of Chinese state intrusion of WeChat which means political topics that include China are often not discussed. A 19-year-old student explained that “I am cautious when using WeChat (. . .) because I have heard of people (. . .) like their account being locked or something because they may have said something critical of the government.” Second, political discussions on WeChat tend to happen in bigger groups like a group of 300 + Chinese students at a Texas University or one of 400 + Chinese parents in Houston. This can lead to information overload as a 40-year-old engineer explained: “Nowadays there is so (much) news—I’m kind of getting tired of following it.” But even in bigger groups a perceived intra-community intimacy prevails. A 19-year-old student explained this when outlining how she pushed back against content ridiculing Beto O’Rourke as “trying to be more immigrant than he is” in an extended family group chat but it was a “good discussion (. . .) just amongst us.” A 22-year-old student explained that, when people don’t want political conversations in one group, he moves to other chats to smaller groups where he discusses politics.

Except for Chinese Americans, small group chats seem to be the main organizational feature of the EMA conversations and multimediality, such as the use of voice messages, memes and accompanying humor, is crucial. Through weaving in political topics into small group chats and often combining it with other topics, contentious or even potentially divisive topics can be discussed in a healthier manner. Such examples show how counterpublics created by diaspora communities via EMAs align with Baym and boyd’s conceptualizations of networked technologies as being used to negotiate “the public” and “the private” (2012). Some group members are more invested than others: A 24-year-old Mexican American student described to us how her father’s side of the family is “very educated” and actively researches good political information from news sources in Spanish to share in the group chat or another 21-year-old Mexican American student in San Antonio who showed us a group her grandfather started with all his grandchildren to share news almost daily. These findings are reminiscent of what Steele (2018) describes with regard to Black online communities who have long relied on nonpolitical spaces for political discussion, in part because of the systemic exclusion of Black people from public debate and political power.

Through the multimediality of political talk on EMAs, further playfulness can lead to engagement with difficult topics. A 19-year-old Indian American student showed us how politically sensitive discussions about Hindu temples/temple destructions in the United States were couched around stickers and funny videos that were shared simultaneously in the chat and allowed people to engage with the topic in different ways. At the same time, misinformation enters the fray such as a popular fake video of the late president Obama being voiced over in Spanish uttering nonsense which “pretty much everyone in my WhatsApp groups believed,” a 30-year-old Mexican American said. While misinformation can badly affect the political discussion, its existence on EMAs does not negate the formation of counterpublics via these platforms but rather shows misinformation’s perpetuality (citation withheld).

Conclusion

While minority communities like diaspora communities in the United States are often simplified into unitary voting blocs or amalgamated in the media (Aguirre et al., 2011; Retis, 2019), it is crucial for American democracy to understand the active ways undertaken by those communities through their own use of digital media. In this study, we have relied on existing conceptualizations around social media and (counter)publics and have shown how EMAs lend themselves to the creation of networked counterpublics for diaspora communities in the United States. However, capitalist considerations by companies often impact the affordances and features of social media platforms. WhatsApp has seen significant changes in the last months, such as increasing the group size from 256 users to 1024 as well as introducing WhatsApp “communities” in which multiple groups can be merged and a separate community chat is created. Therefore, further research could address identity formation via EMAs specifically while broadening the scope to include other aspects of identity than belonging to a diaspora.

Our study explains how the fundamentally different platform features of EMAs integrate into the American public sphere by focusing on diaspora communities. While democratic institutions have always needed support and trust from the majority population to survive (Almond and Verba, 1963; Habermas, 1975), American democracy has repeatedly disenfranchised and/or marginalized minority communities (Judis, 2001). Our study underlines Fiig’s (2011: 293) arguments that actually an opinion formation counterpublic (that Fraser would assign as weak), enables “a range of democratic potentials in relation to democracy and citizenship practice.” The fact that diasporic communities in the United States utilize EMAs for the formation of counterpublics is crucial for democracy as it strengthens heterogeneity and political organizing around minority issues. Future research can take these insights as starting points to examining behaviors in EMAs with wider engagement and participation of diaspora communities, for example, how EMA usage influences partisan attachments and voting.

The “crisis of public trust” can therefore be challenged as a crisis of authority which had relied on certain parts of the population but disregarded others (Richardson, 2020). To radically build public trust that is inclusive, more creative ways are needed than simply trying to (re-)assert legitimacy into mainstream institutions, such as national media. Therefore and while outlining how EMAs lend themselves to the creation of networked counterpublics by diaspora communities this article is also hypothesis generating as the inherent subversiveness of encrypted communication could nurture potentials for democratic inclusiveness against the backdrop of multiplicity, by allowing for a plurality of contesting publics. We therefore encourage research similar to Velasquez et al. (2021) who found that relying on WhatsApp for news sharing and political talk among Latinos in the United States encouraged their political participation.

Furthermore, research on EMAs has become securitized in the last years as fringe and extremists’ groups migrated especially to Telegram (Urman and Katz, 2022). However, we show a second reality to veiled conversations, namely a protective shield for minority populations to discuss potentially sensitive topics. Therefore, this research also has implications for conceptualizations around countering mis-, and disinformation on social media.

Singling out diaspora communities and political conversations in more hidden spaces, such as EMAs, should not be viewed as an effort to “educate” some parts of the population. One could argue that diaspora communities are sometimes more vulnerable to populist rhetoric precisely because they demonstrate a higher degree of skepticism and a critical stance with regards to official news sources—and to participate adequately in American democracy, more hidden spaces are crucial. These unresolved questions demand further research for understanding the developments of American (counter)publics against the backdrop of an ever-changing social media landscape. Relatedly, future research should hone in on the technical features, such as examining (end-to-end) encryption, group technical affordances surrounding group chats, broadcast lists, or super-groups (Glover et al., 2023).

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-nms-10.1177_14614448231203695 – Supplemental material for “On WhatsApp I say what I want”: Messaging apps, diaspora communities, and networked counterpublics in the United States

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-nms-10.1177_14614448231203695 for “On WhatsApp I say what I want”: Messaging apps, diaspora communities, and networked counterpublics in the United States by Inga K Trauthig and Samuel C Woolley in New Media & Society

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-2-nms-10.1177_14614448231203695 – Supplemental material for “On WhatsApp I say what I want”: Messaging apps, diaspora communities, and networked counterpublics in the United States

Supplemental material, sj-docx-2-nms-10.1177_14614448231203695 for “On WhatsApp I say what I want”: Messaging apps, diaspora communities, and networked counterpublics in the United States by Inga K Trauthig and Samuel C Woolley in New Media & Society