I don't know - I've said before, but the bigger red flag to me would be either that they worked for Meta at all, or that they didn't leave of their own accord. Any big tech company pretending someone was let go, as part of a mass lay-off, for performance reasons is generally going to rate as about as truthful as saying it's "because of AI", if I'm looking at hiring.

Not to erase that Meta is an absolutely shitty company run by a literal ghoul enabled by tens of thousands of "people" who are happy to make giving teenage girls depression in return for ad clicks their entire life's work.

I communicate with direct family and many friends through Signal. Don't tell them to replace WhatsApp by Signal. Ask them to install Signal besides WhatsApp.

Both can exist at the same time and this is a route with much less friction and slowly builds the network effect.

If they won't move off of facebook, I'm not sure there's anything you can do to retain the same level of interaction. Maybe you could allow yourself a reduced level of interaction while still feeling connected. For example, an SMS every couple of days should be plenty enough contact to keep up with any significant events. If you really want to take the reins, you could organise events yourself, ensuring you won't miss them.

Or you can do what I did and simply say “fuck it”. Get rid of your account anyway and deal with the consequences. I don’t even have WhatsApp (because, you know, Facebook) but don’t feel like that’s been a detriment to my social life. The people I care about understand and I see most of them on the regular. SMS and phone calls still work. I do know some people who live abroad that fortunately I can communicate via iMessage, but if that weren’t an option then email would have to do. I've been doing this for over a decade and while there was some friction at first, it’s been long since it has been an issue. It probably helps that these days most people understand that avoiding Meta is a good thing.

If you don’t care about people you personally know in your social media, then pick whatever you want depending on features. I recommend Mastodon. It has quirks (what doesn’t) but it’s fine. Chronological (not algorithmic) time-line, open-source, you can even subscribe to people with RSS feeds. If there’s someone you’d like to follow from e.g. Bluesky, there’s often a Mastodon bot for their posts. Or you can subscribe via RSS there as well.

It's their content moderation and perhaps bot policies causing damage.

I have first hand experience with how harmful their policies were during the SARS-COV-2 era, where I and peers who shared about health practices we were following with decades of experience to help improve our health were moderated and censored due to Facebook policies.