By merging WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, Facebook is showing its dominance

After months of unflattering headlines, Facebook is on a mission to prove its corporate responsibility – in doing so it is proving the control it has over our lives

The announcement that Facebook is to integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger into a single infrastructure has unsurprisingly caused a degree of controversy among users (users being more or less everyone in the entire world).

Mark Zuckerberg had previously indicated that Instagram and WhatsApp – acquired by Facebook in 2012 and 2014 respectively – would remain autonomous. That cheered users of WhatsApp in particular, given the app’s focus on encryption; some will wonder whether the merging of the various services will affect that particular feature. They will wonder too what else Zuckerberg might change his mind about.

The details of the developments have yet to be revealed but the news highlights the extent to which Facebook has become dominant in our lives – and the degree to which citizens of the world (or “of nowhere” if you prefer Theresa May’s version) have entrusted their data to a single company.

It may be that Facebook’s move is purely about finding “synergies” (to use the word beloved of consultants) in the broader business.

Given the controversies around use of customer data – not least in the context of the Cambridge Analytica scandal – Facebook may also have come to the view that it is preferable to handle customer information in one place than in three.

Certainly one of the company’s key current priorities is around securing Facebook’s reputation for integrity – a natural response, no doubt, to months of unflattering headlines.

That is true in respect of data issues but is also the case with regard to content, as Facebook endeavours to prove to critics that it is not a hotbed of “fake news”; no longer a platform via which scaremongering and lies can gain a foothold in civic discourse.

Notably, this has seen the firm develop a network of independent fact checkers to monitor material in Facebook’s news feed, determining whether it is accurate and demoting from the feed anything judged to be fake.

In light of the news about Instagram and WhatsApp, it might not be unreasonable to consider whether this service might one day be extended to those platforms. Might fact checkers soon be monitoring your Insta posts for fake snaps?

On the face of it, the move towards taking responsibility for the content that appears on its platform is to Facebook’s credit. By doing so, it has also arguably taken a step towards accepting the notion – much debated – that it is not merely a platform but also a publisher.

Yet the irony about Facebook taking more responsibility over the data, and particularly the content, it holds and – in the latter case – makes visible to the world is that it necessarily means it has more control.

That perhaps is the natural order of things: with power should come responsibility; so thank goodness Facebook has recognised it.

But for those who worry about the way in which our access to, and knowledge of, the world is filtered through the actions of a small number of corporate players, especially in the tech sector, almost anything Facebook does to corral data or determine (even via third parties) what information we see online is a source of anxiety.

The company still has much to do to reassure its critics – and in some cases its users.