India, WhatsApp's Largest Market, Asks Messaging Service To Curb Spread of False Messages in the Nation (reuters.com) 53
India has asked Facebook-owned WhatsApp messenger to take steps to prevent the circulation of false texts and provocative content that have led to a series of lynchings and mob beatings across the country in the past few months. From a report: With more than 200 million users in India, WhatsApp's biggest market in the world, false news and videos circulating on the messaging app have become a new headache for social media giant Facebook, already grappling with a privacy scandal. So far this year, false messages about child abductors on WhatsApp have helped to trigger mass beatings of more than a dozen people in India -- at least three of whom have died. In addition, five people were beaten to death by a mob on Sunday in a fresh incident of lynching in India's western state of Maharashtra on suspicions that they were child abductors. "Deep disapproval of such developments has been conveyed to the senior management of WhatsApp and they have been advised that necessary remedial measures should be taken," India's IT ministry said in a strongly-worded statement on Tuesday. From a report published on The Washington Post earlier this week: As India's government weighs what to do, local authorities have been left to tackle fake news as best they can, issuing warnings and employing low-tech methods such as hiring street performers and "rumor busters" to visit villages to spread public awareness. One such "rumor buster" was killed by a mob Thursday in the eastern state of Tripura.
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No thanks, I pay for prisons with my taxes so criminal morons like Trump have somewhere to go where they're properly respected for what they are: Scumbags.
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teach people how to think critically.
Can you provide an example of this ever happening on a national scale?
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Critical thinking skills? That's crazy talk!
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Naw, piece of cake: Set up a deep learning algo to classify packets as: 1. Lie, 2. Indeterminant, 3. True. Then just filter out the #1s. Done!
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No, it's not funny on the Internet, but the reason it isn't funny is because it is so believable. Trump has a history of appointing people to key positions who have absolutely zero background in the area that they are supposed to be running, like naming DeVos as secretary of educatio
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Hell, Trump himself is unqualified to talk about trade, or business, having neither run a successful b
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Why casinos fail, [newyorker.com] for those incapable of recognizing that operating a casino is not a license to print money.
If someone only had a junk food diet of msm news, never dug up source material to see for themselves the very speeches of which Trump is so highly criticized for when defining all immigrants as "criminals" and "rapists" and "animals", then they might believe your point about fake news because they need to be told what to think.
"he's basically reinforcing the point until people believe it's true."
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Agreed. Furthermore, there are more direct, and appropriate, solutions for combating mob violence than government censorship. People who commit violent crimes should be put on trial and sent to jail.
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People who commit violent crimes should be put on trial and sent to jail.
After they commited the crime. Obviously that is what is happening.
Obviously you don't grasp that the government prefers to prevent the crime ... bad bad government.
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It's forcing us to deal with all sorts of ethical issues, such as personal responsibility for repeating a false rumor, which we previously were able to ignore because they happened much less frequently. But the issues themselves are not new. In most fields
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But if you teach critical thinking in schools, they'll realize that school is bullshit.
Then they can change the schools.
If you think all education/learning is bullshit, there is something wrong with you.
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There are several hurdles to overcome however, some of them I think are unsolvable:
1) Collectively; the human race isn't as smart as it thinks it is. The larger the group, the lower the effective IQ of that group. Critical thinking is hard compared to the sort of thought processes the vast majority of us use daily. Even on a self selected
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Great post. But this relates to #3, and that is useful idiots are useful. Not just participation in religion would suffer from actively reinforcing critical thinking from an early onset, but so too would be the effectiveness of political propaganda. To condition the public to be more resistant to manipulation would not be in the interest of the state as we know it.
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> Then again the majority of India is Muslim. Yep, I said it, Muslim.
You're woefully ignorant. The majority of India is Hindu (about 80%). Only 14% is Muslim.
Or maybe you ignorantly think "Muslim, Hindu, same thing..."
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Your posts are not being taken down. You need to learn how Slashdot and the moderation system actually work. And cacheing.
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Muslim in India are a minority, stupid idiot.
And what has that to do with "fake news" or "lynching" anyway?
No one takws posts down on /. your stupid post will be available for everyone who is interested, for ever. Or as long as the "internet still works".
We're reaching corporate levels of truth here (Score:2)
Ah, Facebook. The ultimate authority when it comes to legally binding decisions of what is True and what is False. I'm sure this will end well.
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no, clearly murderous mobs in India are that ultimate authority. Let's look down on them a bit more than facebook, eh?
End-to-End Encryption (Score:2)