iWorld
Facebook Announces New Communications Head for India
March: Facebook today announced that it has recruited a new communications head to lead its growing corporate communications and public relations mandate in India. Bipasha Chakrabarti will take on the role of Communications Director at Facebook India, and will be a part of the India leadership team, reporting to Ajit Mohan.
Bipasha comes with eighteen years of experience working with leading tech brands and PR agencies. In her last assignment as the Head of Corporate Communications at Cisco India and SAARC, she not only led the entire gamut of communications, including analyst, technology, and corporate communications, but also managed leadership and executive communications for the office of APJC President. Prior to Cisco, Bipasha was with Sun Microsystems. As part of her new role, she will lead the communications charter for both Facebook and Instagram in India.
The announcement comes just a month after Facebook announced the hiring of Avinash Pant as the Marketing Director at Facebook India to drive the company’s consumer marketing efforts across the family of apps. Just a year ago, Facebook had also announced a new leadership structure in India bringing the company’s functions under Ajit Mohan, reporting directly to its headquarters in Menlo Park.
Said Ajit Mohan, VP and MD of Facebook India, “Communications is a critical function for us as we continue to build Facebook’s story in India. We are grateful for the trust that our users, advertisers, partners, and the government have placed in us, and are committed to communicating openly and transparently. Bipasha is among the most seasoned communication professionals in the country and I am very excited to have her join us and lead this charter.”
Over the course of last year, Facebook has spearheaded several India-focused initiatives with a strong focus on fueling entrepreneurship, boosting digital skilling, and breaking the gender imbalance on the Internet.
In the last few months, Facebook has recruited for key roles across multiple functions such as Marketing, Sales, Partnerships, and Policy. Consistent with the new organization structure, several of these roles have been spread across the Facebook family of apps.
iWorld
WhatsApp may soon let users to pick who sees their status updates
The messaging giant is borrowing a page from Instagram’s playbook as it pushes to give users finer control over their social circles.
CALIFORNIA: WhatsApp is quietly working on a feature that could make its Status function considerably smarter and considerably more private.
According to reports from beta tracking platforms, the app is testing a tool called Status lists, which would allow users to create named groups such as close friends, family and colleagues, and control precisely which group sees each update. It is a meaningful step up from the platform’s current blunt instruments, which offer only three options: share with all contacts, exclude specific people, or manually select individuals each time.
The new feature draws an obvious comparison with Instagram’s Close Friends function, and the resemblance is unlikely to be accidental. Both platforms sit within Meta’s family, and the company has been nudging them toward a common logic of audience segmentation for some time.
The move also fits neatly into WhatsApp’s broader privacy push. The platform has been rolling out enhanced chat protections and is exploring the introduction of usernames, which would allow users to connect without exchanging phone numbers. Status lists extend that philosophy from messaging into broadcasting.
Meanwhile, Status itself has been evolving well beyond its origins as a simple photo-and-text slideshow. The feature now supports music stickers, collages, longer videos and interactive elements, pushing it closer to the social-media-style story format pioneered by Snapchat and refined by Instagram. In that context, finer audience controls are not merely a privacy feature. They are a precondition for people sharing more.
The feature remains in development and has not been confirmed for release. WhatsApp routinely tests tools that are later modified or quietly shelved. But the direction of travel is clear: the app wants Status to be a destination, not an afterthought. Letting users decide exactly who is in the audience is how it gets there.
