They just preferred to use WhatsApp. Switching to an alternative was trivially easy. People just didn’t want to because of personal preference. It would be trivially easy for me to stop drinking coffee every morning and only drink water
It’s not about personal preference. It’s about momentum. If I stop drinking coffee, only I am being affected. If I stop using Whatsapp, I now have to convince everyone I’m in contact with to also use the alternative when msging me before I can actually stop using WhatsApp.
If you want it to be a public utility and its owned by an American company, which country is going to be the one to make that happen?
I am confident the EU could do it. A complete transfer of ownership isn’t necessary for other countries to use exported services as public utilities. Public-private partnerships exist.
Also, calling “completely eradicating the first amendment in order to make it so that the American government can forcibly seize and censor people on its new state run social media websites” a “government problem” is an atomic bomb level of understatement.
“American freedom of speech = Nazis get to speak” was your stance before. Now it’s "Anything but American freedom of speech = government censorship". What am I even supposed to say here?