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Community Notes flagged Musk’s claims after he promoted X Chat over WhatsApp and Signal citing privacy concerns.
The clarification followed Musk’s post urging users to switch to X Chat amid a lawsuit targeting WhatsApp’s privacy claims. (IMAGE: REUTERS ILLUSTRATION)
Elon Musk received a Community Notes fact-check on X, the platform he owns, after he promoted X Chat over WhatsApp and Signal, citing privacy concerns linked to a lawsuit against Meta, WhatsApp’s parent company.
On Monday, Musk urged users to stop using WhatsApp, claiming the messaging service was not secure, and instead promoted X Chat as a safer alternative. “WhatsApp is not secure. Even Signal is questionable. Use X Chat,” Musk wrote in a post on X.
The post, however, was later accompanied by a Community Notes clarification, which said Musk’s claim was misleading. The note pointed out that while X Chat offers end-to-end encryption, it lacks forward secrecy, meaning a compromised key could expose past messages. It also said private keys are controlled by X and protected only by a four-digit PIN, while metadata is collected. By contrast, the note added, Signal offers forward secrecy, device-only keys and minimal metadata.
Musk’s remarks came amid a fresh lawsuit against Meta Platforms Inc, the parent company of WhatsApp. An international group of plaintiffs has sued Meta, alleging that the company made false claims about the privacy and security of WhatsApp’s chat service, according to Bloomberg.
The group of plaintiffs includes users from India, as well as Australia, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa. The complaint alleges that Meta stores the substance of users’ communications and that company workers can access them, despite claims that WhatsApp messages are private. Meta has made so-called end-to-end encryption a central part of WhatsApp’s feature set.
The company says this form of encryption ensures that messages are accessible only to the sender and recipient, and not to WhatsApp or Meta itself. In encrypted chats, which Meta says are turned on by default, WhatsApp displays an in-app message stating that “only people in this chat can read, listen to, or share” the messages. In the lawsuit, which was filed last week in the US District Court in San Francisco, the plaintiffs allege that Meta’s privacy claims are false.
They claim that Meta and WhatsApp “store, analyse, and can access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications”, and accuse the companies and their leaders of defrauding billions of users worldwide. The complaint also cites unnamed “whistleblowers” as having helped bring the alleged practices to light, though it does not identify them or explain their role in detail. Meta has strongly rejected the allegations.
A spokesperson for the company, which acquired WhatsApp in 2014, called the lawsuit “frivolous” and said Meta would pursue sanctions against the plaintiffs’ counsel. “Any claim that people’s WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is categorically false and absurd,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in an email. “WhatsApp has been end-to-end encrypted using the Signal protocol for a decade. This lawsuit is a frivolous work of fiction.”
San Francisco, California, USA
January 27, 2026, 19:44 IST
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