After reading the passage below, answer the questions that follow. Be sure to "submit" your response for each question. You will initially receive full credit for each question, but your grade may change once your instructor reviews your responses. Be sure to check the grade book for your final grade.
Mobile Apps Compete for World Influence
For more than a billion people, one app has become the “go to” mobile phone app. Is it Google Search? YouTube? No, it’s called WeChat, and in China it is the primary way to send text messages as well as photos and videos (Thayer & Han, 2019). In the United States, messaging apps like Facebook’s Messenger, Snapchat, and Instagram or Twitter direct messages (DM) are becoming increasingly popular, but most text messaging is still primarily done using Short Message Service (SMS) through a person’s mobile phone number. In other parts of the world, however, mobile phone services often do not offer unlimited texting as part of the costs of a data plan. So users turn to data-frugal internet-based mobile apps that accomplish the same messaging functions, and often much more. In Europe, for example, most people use WhatsApp (Pinchas, 2018). In addition to the cost savings, messaging apps like WhatsApp (owned by Facebook since 2014) and WeChat offer a much less cumbersome way to send photos and video, make it easy to create memes and graphics, and are integrated with social media apps.
For users of China’s WeChat, easy messaging and social media use are just the beginning. WeChat is sometimes called a “super app” because it is many apps within an app — it is used for everything from ordering dinner to hailing a taxi to playing video games to paying bills. You can, for all intents and purposes, live your entire life within WeChat (Pierce, 2015). WeChat has a strong presence in southeast Asia, has expanded into Europe, and has also made huge strides in Africa, where mobile phones are an opportunity to open up access to the internet. But some critics argue that the global presence of WeChat may come at a cost. All of the information on the platform is monitored, collected, stored, analyzed, censored and accessed by Chinese authorities cautions Lianchao Han, the vice president of Citizen Power Initiatives for China, and political scientist Bradley Thayer (Thayer & Han, 2019). Integrating many everyday activities into one highly controlled app provides enormous convenience, but possibly at the expense of personal privacy and unrestricted access to information.