Somalia backs India’s objection to WhatsApp’s username switch

Somalia has thrown its weight behind India’s objection to WhatsApp’s plan to let people connect through usernames rather than phone numbers, widening a dispute that now spans two continents.

The backing, makes Somalia the second national government in a week to formally query Meta over the usernames feature it began rolling out at the end of June.

WhatsApp started letting its roughly three billion users reserve unique handles on 29 June, with the feature due to go live properly later this year. A phone number is still needed to open an account, but once a handle is set, new contacts no longer have to see the number behind it.

That design is precisely what worries New Delhi, which last week asked WhatsApp to pause the rollout while it consults on the fraud risks. With more than 600 million users, India is WhatsApp’s single biggest market, and its Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology gave Meta three days to explain why the feature would not fuel impersonation.

Somalia’s regulator has now echoed that reasoning. Mustafa Yasin Sheikh, director-general of the National Communications Authority of Somalia, told Bloomberg by phone on Monday that swapping phone numbers for handles could hinder the ability of Somali security agencies to identify people involved in terrorism, organised crime, and other illegal activity.

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“Somalia is following India’s example,” Sheikh said. He listed concerns about the impersonation of government institutions and public officials, financial fraud aimed at Somalia’s mobile money ecosystem, and the misuse of anonymous communications by groups such as al-Shabaab and organised cybercriminal networks.

The reference is not incidental. Somalia’s government has been fighting the al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabaab insurgency since 2006, a conflict that has killed thousands and displaced millions, and the country treats any loosening of digital traceability as a security question first.

Meta did not respond to an emailed request for comment on Somalia’s objections, according to the outlets carrying the Bloomberg report. The company has previously said the feature is not yet live in India and that it has pre-emptively reserved usernames resembling those of public figures, government bodies, and verified Meta accounts to head off impersonation.

The shared thread running through both governments’ complaints is traceability, the worry that a visible handle rather than a number gives investigators a thinner starting point when chasing a bad actor. India’s notice warned that usernames “may facilitate impersonation and identity spoofing, including impersonation of individuals, public authorities, financial institutions, and government agencies.”

It is an argument India has made before. When the government moved to trace WhatsApp messages in earlier disputes, Meta resisted on the grounds that such demands would weaken end-to-end encryption for every user, not just those under suspicion.

The usernames row also sits alongside a broader Indian push against anonymity features in messaging apps. New Delhi recently blocked Telegram channels over leaked exam papers, and MeitY has since sent similar notices to Telegram and Signal about their own username systems.

Not everyone accepts the legal footing. The Internet Freedom Foundation, a New Delhi digital rights group, has argued that MeitY is stretching a platform-liability provision of the IT Act into product-design oversight, and that fraud should be prosecuted under existing criminal law rather than pre-empted by holding back a feature.

For now, the feature remains unavailable in India, and Somalia’s intervention signals that Meta’s phone-number-free vision may face a country-by-country negotiation rather than a single global switch. What Mogadishu does next, and whether other states follow, will show how far the objection travels.