No. Shit.

People who say Facebook (now Meta) paid $21 billion (with a B) for WhatsApp to be charitable. Even though the original creators have distanced themselves from it after the acquisition.

Fun fact: every forum running phpBB, Invision, or vBulletin (as in, traditional Internet forums) can read your DMs in plaintext. They’re unencrypted in the SQL database. However, the forum’s Admin Control Panel (ACP) does not provide this functionality. All three have mods that add it in. So imagine you run a forum. You have a hidden forum where only your mods and admins can interact. No one else can even see it. You could have a whole other one that is just all the DMs. I’m not sure about social networks. But I know if you have command-line access to the SQL database, you can query a user and see everything that user has put in the database. Public messages… and private ones. So a lot of the forums started saying “Personal messages” or “Direct messages” instead of “Private messages” because they were never private.

Disbelieve anyone who says they can’t see your private or personal messages.