India, WhatsApp's Largest Market, Asks Messaging Service To Curb Spread of False Messages in the Nation

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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[Anonymous Coward]

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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[account_deleted]

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[ShanghaiBill]

teach people how to think critically.

Can you provide an example of this ever happening on a national scale?

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[Vaibhav Dalvi]

Heck, even when people are taught all the good things, most of them shall ignore the teachings and do whatever the hell they want to do! That's humanity - free will et all!!!

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[Zorro]

Critical thinking skills? That's crazy talk!

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[Billy the Mountain]

Unfortunately, the implementation of that is damn near impossible.

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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[dgatwood]

It's funny if you're at a comedy club. It's NOT funny when it's on the internet, posing as real news. Because yes, some people don't realize it's a joke, and yes, sometimes people DO weird, insane, ridiculous, dastardly things.

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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[tlhIngan]

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 education. Shatner at least has some appreciation of what NASA does, so it wouldn't be his worst appointment by a fairly large margin.

Hell, Trump himself is unqualified to talk about trade, or business, having neither run a successful b

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[eaglesrule]

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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[Atmchicago]

The solution to the issue of Fake News seems obvious enough: teach people how to think critically.

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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[angel'o'sphere]

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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[Solandri]

Good luck with that. This isn't some new problem which only popped up recently with the advent of social media. It's been happening since the beginning of civilization. Social media is what happens when you dial up the rumor and gossip mill to 11.

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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[loonycyborg]

I don't think it's about critical thinking. Pretty much everyone can figure out that such information source can be fake. What if they just really want to kill people for different reasons and take this as excuse?

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[nnet]

You mean like teaching people to be actively involved in civic duty? Or be respectful? Or not be avaricious/greedy/narcissistic?

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[corydoras]

But if you teach critical thinking in schools, they'll realize that school is bullshit.

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[tehcyder]

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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[morethanapapercert]

I agree with the need for teaching critical thinking skills to the public, I've thought it was desperately needed since I was old enough to understand what hypocrisy was.

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

One more

[eaglesrule]

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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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[Anonymous Coward]

> 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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[Zontar The Mindless]

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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[angel'o'sphere]

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

[HeckRuler]

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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[iggymanz]

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

[secondhand_Buddah]

The obvious point is that Whatsapp runs on end-to-end encryption, so it cannot be censored or monitored by design, so what the Indian government want is irrelevant.