Somalia is Scared WhatsApp Usernames Will Make Al Shabaab Stronger

Somalia has raised concerns over Meta Platforms’ planned introduction of WhatsApp usernames, warning that the feature could make it harder to track criminals and militants in a country battling a decades-long Islamist insurgency.

The feature, expected to roll out to WhatsApp’s three billion users in the coming months, will allow people to communicate using usernames instead of sharing their phone numbers. Users will still need a phone number to register for the app but the feature is not yet live.

Somalia’s Communications and Technology Minister Ahmed Osman Dirie said the government had contacted Meta to express concerns that allowing users to change or hide their identities behind usernames could weaken law enforcement efforts.

“We’ll reach a resolution on this matter very soon,” Dirie said this week.

Somalia has been fighting al Shabaab, an al Qaeda affiliate, for more than two decades. The militant group has frequently used digital platforms for propaganda, recruitment and extortion.

In 2024, Somalia’s intelligence agency said it had shut down 20 WhatsApp groups allegedly operated by al Shabaab for extortion and intimidation and disabled data services for about 2,500 phone numbers linked to the groups.

Dirie said Somalia’s economy depended heavily on mobile money and that replacing phone numbers with “unverified and untraceable usernames” could increase financial fraud and make citizens more vulnerable to scammers.

He said the government currently regulates phone numbers used in the country and argued that WhatsApp’s planned change would undermine those efforts.

“So moving away from phone numbers to usernames, we believe, will make it difficult for us to counter those crimes,” he said.

Dirie said Meta needed to demonstrate that concealing phone numbers would not “erode digital traceability” and provide “specific safeguards” against financial fraud.

“If they prove that, when we discuss if we put those safeguards in place, then we will not have any issue with rolling out the new feature,” he said.

Meta says the feature includes built-in protections against scams and reiterated that users would still need a phone number to create a WhatsApp account.

Somalia’s concerns echo those raised by India, WhatsApp’s largest market with more than 850 million users. Earlier this month, Indian authorities asked Meta to delay the rollout, saying usernames could facilitate fraud, impersonation and other crimes by allowing users to contact people without revealing their phone numbers.

Technology analyst Moses Kemibaro said the feature was designed to strengthen user privacy by making WhatsApp more like other Meta-owned platforms such as Instagram, where identities are not tied to phone numbers.

“It’s almost saying that this can work irrespective of the phone number and just give you a single identity,” he said, as quoted by the BBC.

Kemibaro said governments nevertheless had legitimate concerns about security and called on Meta to explain whether regulators would still be able to identify users behind usernames.

“[It is] a very sensitive issue around the possibility of escalation in scams and risky propositions that might actually come out of this new trend,” he said.

However, the feature could improve user privacy by reducing the exposure of personal phone numbers, which are sometimes harvested from WhatsApp groups and misused. Some governments have also used information shared in such groups to target critics.

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