Meta is discontinuing cross-messaging between Instagram and Facebook

If you have been following Facebook/Meta for a while then you must be aware that the company wanted to merge all of its apps and also announced that they plan to let its customers chat with one another be it on different platforms. This means that you can chat with your Instagram friends directly via WhatsApp and even message your Facebook friends on Instagram and vice-versa. However, it seems like things have not gone to plan for Meta as the company has now said that they are discontinuing this service entirely.

Meta announced today that the ability to cross-message between Instagram and Facebook will be discontinued. At the time of this announcement, we knew that there were privacy concerns related to this cross-messaging idea and it now seems that those were indeed true. “Meta has silently updated its support pages to indicate that the company won’t let users on Instagram message their Facebook contacts anymore”, TechCrunch reports. When asked by 9to5Google regarding this change, the company responded by saying that “the feature will shut down mid-December — without specifying a date”. “The support page indicates that while you won’t be able to start new cross-platform conversations, your existing chats on Instagram will become read-only.” Earlier this year, a popular blog reporting on WhatsApp features said that “Meta-owned WhatsApp has started working on an interoperability feature as the blog spotted a “third-party chats” screen.” If that planned feature is going ahead or not is anyone’s guess with this change now.

Meta’s deputy privacy officer Rob Sherman said Instagram DMs would also get end-to-end encryption protection once the Messenger rollout is complete. The company didn’t immediately comment if the discontinuation of cross-platform messaging was related to this development. Meta has also agreed “to allow users a greater degree of control over cross-site activities, upon the direction of the German antitrust body in June”. While the company did not provide any reason as to why this feature is being discontinued, it is quite possible that one reason could be the inability to provide end-to-end encryption for cross-messaging users and that would make its platform vulnerable.