Warning Signal: the messaging app’s new features are causing internal turmoil - The Verge

But in a 12-hour period the Sunday after WhatsApp’s privacy policy update began, Signal added another 2 million users, an employee familiar with the matter told me.

While the company won’t confirm the size of its user base, a second employee told me the app has now surpassed 40 million users globally.

And while Signal still has a small fraction of the market for mobile messaging — Telegram, another upstart messenger, says it added 90 million active users in January alone — the rapid growth has been a cause for excitement inside the small distributed team that makes the app.

“We’re organized as a nonprofit because we feel like the way the internet currently works is insane,” CEO Moxie Marlinspike told me.

But those warnings have largely gone unheeded, they told me, as the company has pursued a goal to hit 100 million active users and generate enough donations to secure Signal’s long-term future.

“The world needs products like Signal — but they also need Signal to be thoughtful,” said Gregg Bernstein, a former user researcher who left the organization this month over his concerns.

On October 28th, Signal added group links, a feature that has become increasingly common to messaging apps.

With a couple of taps, users could begin creating links that would allow anyone to join a chat in a group as large as 1,000 people.

At the same time, the links make it easy for activists to recruit large numbers of people onto Signal simultaneously, with just a few taps.

But as the US presidential election grew closer, some Signal employees began raising concerns that group links could be abused.

On September 29th, during a debate, President Trump had told the far-right extremist group the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” During an all-hands meeting, an employee asked Marlinspike how the company would respond if a member of the Proud Boys or another extremist organization posted a Signal group chat link publicly in an effort to recruit members and coordinate violence.

“The response was: if and when people start abusing Signal or doing things that we think are terrible, we’ll say something,” said Bernstein, who was in the meeting, conducted over video chat.

Marlinspike’s response, he told me in a conversation last week, was rooted in the idea that because Signal employees cannot see the content on their network, the app does not need a robust content policy.

“We think a lot on the product side about what it is that we’re building, how it’s used, and the kind of behaviors that we’re trying to incentivize,” Marlinspike told me.

At the same time, employees said, Signal is developing multiple tools simultaneously that could be ripe for abuse.

In the past, Marlinspike has advised MobileCoin, a cryptocurrency built on the Stellar blockchain designed to make payments simple and secure — and, potentially, impossible to trace.

But significant engineering resources have been devoted to developing MobileCoin integrations in recent quarters, former employees said.

“If we did decide we wanted to put payments into Signal, we would try to think really carefully about how we did that,” Marlinspike said.

Employees have been told that for Signal to become self-sustaining, it will need to reach 100 million users.

Those efforts have been led by two people in particular: Marlinspike, a former head of product security at Twitter whose long career in hacking and cryptography was recently profiled in The New Yorker, and Acton, whose title as executive chairman of the Signal Foundation dramatically understates his involvement in the project’s day-to-day operations.

He participates in all-hands meetings and helps to set the overall direction of the company, employees said.

“There is no morality attached to technology, it’s people that attach morality to technology,” Acton told Steven Levy for his book Facebook: The Inside Story.

“The thing about software is that you never can fully anticipate everything,” Marlinspike told me.

And he said Signal would change or even eliminate group links from the product if they were abused on a wide scale

Still, Marlinspike said, it was important to him that Signal not become neutered in the pursuit of a false neutrality between good and bad actors

Signal exists to improve that experience and make it accessible to more people, even if bad actors might also find it useful

“I want us as an organization to be really careful about doing things that make Signal less effective for those sort of bad actors if it would also make Signal less effective for the types of actors that we want to support and encourage,” he said

There are little things he could do to stop Signal from becoming a tool for tragic events, while still protecting the integrity of the product for the people who need it the most.”