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How Facebook's WhatsApp Destroyed A Village (buzzfeednews.com) 229

The proliferation of affordable smartphones, dwindling data prices, and apps and services that are designed to work swiftly on such patchy infrastructure have changed how people in developing markets marred with poor literacy level such as India communicate, do business, and get their education. But it has also come at a cost. In the recent months we have learned about Facebook's struggle to contain violence in Myanmar, BuzzFeed News has a chilling story on how rumors circulated through WhatsApp, which is also owned by Facebook, are causing real violence in India, the world's second largest internet market. From the report: WhatsApp, a Facebook-owned messaging service, is used by more than 200 million people in India, its largest market. It's become an inextricable part of the country's culture and social fabric, widely used by younger and older generations alike. It's one of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's crown jewels, an app he acquired for $19 billion in 2014 that began as a messaging platform but is now evolving into something more, with a new payments feature already being tested in India.

Lately, however, WhatsApp has been getting Indians killed. In June, rumors about child kidnappers shared on the service inspired a mob of hundreds to lynch a 29-year-old man and his friend who were passing through a village in Karbi Anglong, a district in the eastern part of the country. In July, two weeks after the Rainpada incident, hundreds of people hurled stones at an IT worker who was visiting the South Indian village of Murki, killing him. Since May, there have been at least 16 lynchings leading to 29 deaths in India where public officials say mobs were incited by misinformation on WhatsApp. As Facebook wrangles an ongoing crisis of public confidence over its role in spreading misinformation throughout the 2016 US presidential election, the company is grappling with a different kind of problem in places like Rainpada, where its products have abetted flesh-and-blood harm. In attempting to fulfill Facebook's current mission -- to "give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together" -- Zuckerberg and his team of Silicon Valley-based executives failed to foresee its malignant applications: misinformation, propaganda, rumor, hate.

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How Facebook's WhatsApp Destroyed A Village

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  • by Revek ( 133289 ) on Monday September 10, 2018 @09:46AM (#57284044)

    Let face it. These people are doing this to themselves. Its not facebooks problem if they can't learn to not let themselves be trolled in to violence. In this case someone told them to walk off a cliff and they did. Sounds like this country has many deep seated problems that the tech is just shining a light on.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday September 10, 2018 @09:52AM (#57284102)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by dryriver ( 1010635 )
        When poorly educated, non tech-literate people encounter a technology like Whatsapp for the first time, the experience feels so "high tech" and "revolutionary" to them, that they are psychologically incapable of understanding that stuff that is messaged to them over said new technology to them may be "malicious, and completely untrue" in nature. They open WhatsApp, somebody on that glitzy high-tech service tells them "pedophiles and rapists are coming to your village - defend your women and children", and t
        • by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Monday September 10, 2018 @10:43AM (#57284418) Journal

          Who is primarily at fault here, of course, is the fucking no-good troll-maniancs who are putting these hoaxes on WhatsApp in the first place.

          Well of course.

          But the reality is that anybody can tell anybody anything. So it's imperative that people learn to take stuff with a grain of salt.

          Either way, when someone gossips over the fence, the fault is not the fence's ...

          • The fence doesn't facilitate the discussion. The fence doesn't blast the conversation out to a million people. Facebook, unlike a fence, is composed of sentient beings who don't *have* to relay messages that incite violence over patent falsehoods.

            Shittiest analogy on Slashdot so far today. If we must make an analogy here, which I personally wouldn't, it's more that Facebook is the police department, since they have the ability and authority to moderate clear disturbances in the public square.
            • by sjames ( 1099 )

              But they don't. WhatsApp is end to end encryption. Facebook cannot read your messages, nor would we want them to. Their job, like the fence is to provide a place where people can voluntarily communicate with each other. It doesn't know what is being said and it doesn't make you type anything at all. It neither puts words in your mouth nor takes them out.

            • by hjf ( 703092 )

              Yes. But this is WhatsApp. An Instant Messaging app designed to replace SMS in places where SMS was charged per-message. WhatsApp is not a "wall". People have to deliberately "forward" messages for this to happen.

        • by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 10, 2018 @10:48AM (#57284450)


          they are psychologically incapable of understanding that stuff that is messaged to them over said new technology to them may be "malicious, and completely untrue" in nature.

          Please don't turn this into a poor, dumb 3rd world problem vs a smart, educated 1st world. Some idiot in the US shot up a pizza parlor because of that stupid PizzaGate stuff. There continues to be lots of moronic conspiracy theories that float all over the western "educated" world too. Large amounts of people in the US have convinced themselves freaking gluten, which we've eaten for a few thousand years, is now suddenly a poison. Many people think the moon landings were faked. In the 70s people believed all kinds of weird stuff about how there were "ancient astronauts", and the Egyptian pyramids were constructed by Aliens. Ben Carson, a former neurosurgeon and the current the secretary HUD thinks the pyramids were built to store grain!

          People are stupid and don't care about finding truth, and it doesn't matter if they're "educated" or not. Different people are just susceptible to different bullshit. The only difference is that now it's even easier to spread BS. BS is just easier to spread because it doesn't have this unfortunate property of being limited to what's actually real. BS can be anything, and that's what's appealing about it.

        • by Hercules Peanut ( 540188 ) on Monday September 10, 2018 @10:52AM (#57284482)

          But mark my words as someone with experience of the developing world - not only can undereducated people rarely tell whether what is told to them is factually true or not, whether on TV, internet or in newspapers, but when they encounter fake-information or fake-news on high tech digital messaging services, they are even less able to discern what is true and what is not. Their instinct is to trust what they hear, see or read on digital communication platforms.

          Developing world? How, exactly, is this different from America?

        • by bob4u2c ( 73467 ) on Monday September 10, 2018 @10:55AM (#57284496)

          Wow, the pot calling the kettle black!

          What about the man who show showed up armed at a supposed pizza joint owned by Hillary to rescue human trafficking victims? Or how about the pee video Russia held as blackmail against Trump?

          No, the US isn't any better. There is no defense of mob mentality in India or the US. If you think someone has committed a crime, report it and give all the evidence you can, then let the judge and jury calmly make a decision about guilt.

          On a side note, I really wish reporters here in the US would stop trying to incite action and do their job of reporting facts, not opinions.

        • I don't think this has anything to do with third wold countries or groups of people experiencing a new technology. Look at all of the lives that have been destroyed in the U.S. over various moral panics over the years. Fortunately we've at least stopped lynching people, but even back in the 80's people went to jail over a supposed (and wrong) belief that there was rampant Satanic ritual abuse of children in day care facilities [wikipedia.org].
          • by jythie ( 914043 )
            One of the factors that caused the satanic panic to blow up so much was the introduction of fax machines, which allowed the panic to spread in ways that earlier ones were unable to. So there is a 'new technology' aspect that seems to allow things to allow a period of new panics until the tech becomes common place, then you get new panics when some new technology comes onto the scene.
        • 49% of America believed the same claims about the Mexicans.
          52% Britain believed the same claims about the Europeans.

          Stupidity is not, apparently, terribly territorial. And whilst there are good reasons for thinking good education would help, nobody is willing to pay for it. It's like vaccines, unless 95% or more are inoculated against ignorance, there's no herd immunity and everyone becomes infected with stupid. And that requires a total rejection of the theory that people should be responsible for their own education, it has to be collective and most societies can't handle that.

          But it's not just that. I suggest reading through Tacitus' book A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, or the Causes of Corrupt Eloquence [librivox.org].

          • Stupidity is not, apparently, terribly territorial.

            But saddly as you point later out, stupidiy is linked to education.
            A good education can including training to be a tiny bit more gulibility-proof.

            But sadly, currently some territories seem to have less available good education.

            So stupidity isn't territorial in the sense the {Ethnicity_that_your_local_far_right_uses_as_scapegoat} are natually more stupid,
            but there are still discrepencies (based on economics).

            And whilst there are good reasons for thinking good education would help, nobody is willing to pay for it. It's like vaccines, unless 95% or more are inoculated against ignorance, there's no herd immunity and everyone becomes infected with stupid.

            I actually like you metaphore of "herd immunity against ignorance" (immunity against meme-fection ?)

            • A good education can including training to be a tiny bit more gulibility-proof.

              Sadly, the person who typed the above probably thinks he/she/it has a good education....

        • by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

          Don't blame tech literacy or misplaced trust here. Those people committing violence were already going to do so, they are just looking for any excuse to do it. If Whatsapp goes away, the violence will continue, they will just use a different excuse for what incited them.

          Did any of those who committed these atrocities say "Oh, you mean that person was a really nice guy? I didn't know! I trusted NICEGUY47 on Whatsapp! It is total coincidence that the victim was Rohingya, and that I've been spitting on th

        • When poorly educated, non tech-literate people encounter a technology like Whatsapp for the first time, the experience feels so "high tech" and "revolutionary" to them, that they are psychologically incapable of understanding that stuff that is messaged to them over said new technology to them may be "malicious, and completely untrue" in nature.

          ....if the very first movie they see is 1978's Superman, and then jump off a building to see if they can fly?

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by sycodon ( 149926 ) on Monday September 10, 2018 @10:44AM (#57284424)

        Are they publishers and therefore responsible for their content and obligated to remove offensive and inaccurate information, etc?

        Or do they fall more into the Common Carrier definition, which largely absolves them of any obligation regarding the content they carry, except for marketing and public relations issues, and invalidates their arguments for selectively squelching speech of viewpoints they don't like?

        They need to decide or the Feds will end up doing it. And we all know the Feds will likely get it wrong.

      • by v1 ( 525388 )

        That's just it - this isn't a Facebook problem, it's a Mob Justice problem.

        It seems pretty clear to me that these people would have used whatever "vehicle" happened to come popular first to coordinate and execute their mob justice social tendencies.

        So getting rid of facebook won't fix the problem any more than getting rid of cocaine will fix the drug problem. They'll just find another way to do what they feel like doing.

        Focus on the problem, not the tool.

      • The end will justify the means.

        This is intellectually dishonest. I dislike Facebook too; however, once you allow one instance of "the end justifies the means", all sorts of other evils become allowed. Not wise.

    • Its not facebooks problem if they can't learn to not let themselves be trolled in to violence. In this case someone told them to walk off a cliff and they did.

      More to the point, you can't blame Facebook for rumors being circulated on their service any more than you can blame the air for rumors being spread face to face.

    • by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Monday September 10, 2018 @10:11AM (#57284218) Homepage

      Poorer societies with lesser access to education are prone to violence and unrest. This has nothing to do with malfunctioning humans. You're making a very attractive and popular mistake of attributing behavior all humans are capable to to the intrinsic nature of .. a country? Something in the water? Surely you're not saying it's a racial thing, right?

      Everyone on earth was happily doing stuff like this not so very long ago. Those "witches" weren't doing it to themselves anymore than the victims of social media fueled violence in India are doing it to themselves - and frankly it's stupid to expect everyone in the entire world to behave the way you do, to use technologies in the same ways you do, given the stark differences in the environment, resources, education, political and economic stability in which people grow up and live.

      But damn you seem worried that Facebook is being accused of killing people. That's reductio ad absurdum - but engineers and makers of technology should be expected to have a social responsibility to try and limit the ways in which different societies may abuse their work. That's nothing new. Engineering programs the world over include social science courses teaching us Engineers as much, and those responsibilities are part of the values professional engineering organizations seek to uphold.

      • by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Monday September 10, 2018 @10:43AM (#57284412) Homepage

        But damn you seem worried that Facebook is being accused of killing people. That's reductio ad absurdum - but engineers and makers of technology should be expected to have a social responsibility to try and limit the ways in which different societies may abuse their work.

        No, most of the time this is insanity brought by people who want to "unvent" things. A knife doesn't know if you're stabbing someone. A camera doesn't know if you're producing kiddie porn. Instead of being simple tools technology is supposed to be your watcher, except the telescreens are smaller and you carry them in your pocket to ensure you're only doing "acceptable" things with them. If you accept that, you forego any right to complain about privacy, DRM, lack of digital ownership etc. you're basically renting your very existence subject to terms and conditions. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, go directly to China.

        • by SirSlud ( 67381 )

          You just named a bunch of technologies mentioned by name in law to regulate how they are used. Nobody is trying to unvent things - that's impossible. Suggesting people propose that things be unvented is again just a logical fallacy to make the concern about how technologies get used appear ridiculous or unreasonable even tho it's something we have done since the beginning of history. You're being stupid. Don't be stupid.

          • by Kjella ( 173770 )

            Nobody is trying to unvent things - that's impossible.

            Many, many people wish to preserve the status quo even though technology has made it impossible. Take for example encryption, nobody had an unbreakable safe before - with enough effort any safe could be drilled open. That possibility is gone, so now the police want backdoors to restore the status quo. I'm not being stupid, you're being blind.

            • _Single_ use pads have been unbreakable encryption for many centuries.

              Only as unbreakable as the pads are secure, but there always has to be a way to unencrypt.

              I think there is a market for matched, large, flash drives full of truly random data.

          • by sjames ( 1099 )

            Sure, but those things don't do the watching. They don't even passively control your use of them. Some uses are against the law, but it is up to law enforcement to detect those uses based on physical effects and prosecute specifically the unlawful uses.

            If instead of murder, you chop onions with your knife, there isn't a cop looking in and deciding that's OK. No logic in the knife decides to extend the blade when it sees that you're approaching an onion rather than someone's chest.

            Likewise, the camera doesn'

      • Lynching was common in the US 100 years ago so I don't think this easily attributable to race but what is that such an objectionable thing to even consider? Societies do reflect the people that make them up. Are you arguing that there is no difference between races or that evolution only acts on various flavors of humans from the neck down and then from the neck up it is only skin deep?
      • by Revek ( 133289 )

        Oh I didn't imply that it was just in India who has this problem. Choose your own way to describe it but malfunctioning humans is my way of describing anyone who is to lazy to seek their own truth. We have this problem in the US. Education is not relevant to the problem. These people have the same fears as all of us but are willing to act in violence to satisfy them. They are unwilling to learn new things. This isn't limited to one country but is a universal problem. Ignorance is bliss and these peop

        • by SirSlud ( 67381 )

          Ignorance is bliss and these people are pissing bliss.

          Those words apply equally to you.

    • by sjames ( 1099 )

      This. It seems like any efficient communications system including reliable carrier pigeons would have the same effect. The answer is not shooting the pigeons down.

    • Yeah, this premise is ridiculous. In order for WhatsApp to be at fault, the system itself would need to send people messages inciting some kind of violence. If the people are sending each other messages then the method of delivery is not the story.

  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Monday September 10, 2018 @09:46AM (#57284050)

    Zuckerberg and his team of Silicon Valley-based executives failed to foresee its malignant applications: misinformation, propaganda, rumor, hate.

    That's the New York Times' job.

  • Since May, there have been at least 16 lynchings leading to 29 deaths in India where public officials say mobs were incited by misinformation on WhatsApp. As Facebook wrangles an ongoing crisis of public confidence over its role in spreading misinformation throughout the 2016 US presidential election, the company is grappling with a different kind of problem in places like Rainpada, where its products have abetted flesh-and-blood harm.

    I would rather have that such kind of reports be balanced with something positive WhatsApp & the like have been responsible for. I am sure there is something we call all be proud of.

    Off my head, I can think of cheap phone calls apps like WhatsApp have enabled. This way, the big telecom companies' greed has been tamed.

  • not Facebook.
    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Found another Facebook employee!

    • Rumours ... not Facebook.

      No, it's not Facebook OR Rumours. It's the local culture that finds it reasonable to stone a traveling IT guy to death over imaginary threats he hasn't exhibited and for which there is no actual evidence. Yes, I know, we get "educated" people like college student and staff Antifa members acting out their lefty political passions by beating people bloody on US college campuses for what might be said during a seminar about international trade. And I suppose those guys would go all the way through with killin

  • by lq_x_pl ( 822011 )
    The app didn't do any of the beating or lynching -- it just brought more people into the knitting circle. As an aside: who the fuck uses buzzfeed as a primary news source? Shame on you.
  • by Sloppy ( 14984 ) on Monday September 10, 2018 @10:00AM (#57284160) Homepage Journal

    C'mon, the title is so obviously wrong. You don't even have to RTFA; the summary is enough to prove that the person who wrote the title wasn't even trying to be accurate.

    • Notably, a large portion of India has higher literacy rates than the United States. Check out Kerala [wikipedia.org]. They're apparently above 80% now.

      The United States doesn't report literacy rates. Various analysis has suggested the US is somewhere between 65% and 85%, depending on what you call "illiterate"; in general, 14% of American adults last decade were considered "below a basic level of literacy".

      • Notably, a large portion of India has higher literacy rates than the United States. Check out Kerala [wikipedia.org]. They're apparently above 80% now.

        The United States doesn't report literacy rates. Various analysis has suggested the US is somewhere between 65% and 85%, depending on what you call "illiterate"; in general, 14% of American adults last decade were considered "below a basic level of literacy".

        Well, so much for the theory that the reason for these slaughters is that these people are poorly educated [slashdot.org].

        • by djinn6 ( 1868030 )
          Ironic how you've fell for misinformation in a discussion about misinformation.

          GP was probably referring to studies such as this [ed.gov]. But unfortunately, that does not support the idea that India is anywhere close to the US in education.

          Twenty-one to 23 percent — or some 40 to 44 million of the 191 million adults in this country — demonstrated skills in the lowest level of prose, document, and quantitative proficiencies (Level 1).
          Twenty-five percent of the respondents who performed in this level were immigrants who may have been just learning to speak English. Nearly two-thirds of those in Level 1 (62 percent) had terminated their education before completing high school. A third were age 65 or older, and 26 percent had physical, mental, or health conditions that kept them from participating fully in work, school, housework, or other activities. Nineteen percent of the respondents in Level 1 reported having visual difficulties that affect their ability to read print.

          Yes, new immigrants are unable to read English, but you wouldn't call them illiterate if they read in Spanish or Chinese instead. And a person can be a PhD in English literature and still lose their vision due to old age.

          Meanwhile, the US is about 45% college graduates, to

      • The only way I can see it being that high in the US would be due to immigrants not familiar with the native language. That isn't really a fair comparison. While literacy is still a problem in the US it is improving going by these 1992 vs 2003 numbers link [ed.gov]. I just glanced at this study but I think it has gone from 9% below basic proficiency for whites to 7% and for blacks it has improved quite a bit from 30% below basic proficiency to 24%. Possibly higher now since those are 2003 numbers
        • Being familiar with what native language? Puerto Rico has a 93% literacy rate; more than half of Puerto Ricans are English-illiterate.

          English-illiterate doesn't necessarily mean illiterate.

          There are newspapers in 20 different languages in Kerala. Literacy rate is like 94%.

          As for your study, prose literacy has gone from 9% to 7% for whites. It's overall 14% below basic for Prose literacy, 12% below basic for Document literacy, and 22% below basic for Quantitative literacy. That means 78% quantitat

          • by djinn6 ( 1868030 )
            Why are you talking about Kerala? That's not where the events of the story happened (Assam). I can probably find a US state with higher than average literacy level too, but it's meaningless for comparison.
            • My point is literacy isn't necessarily about who speaks English or whatnot; Kerala has 20 languages, which kind of emphasizes the problem with "someone might speak some other language and not speak mine well."

              United States citizens who have a poor grasp on basic English literacy are considered literate in counts because they're fully fluent in Spanish and live in a part of the US where that's considered literate.

  • by BWS ( 104239 ) <swang@cs.dal.ca> on Monday September 10, 2018 @10:00AM (#57284164)

    This is going to lead to the Indian government banning WhatApps, etc and prompting a solution it can control. Such as Tencent's WeChat which is being promoted in India. This is super good for me, I own shares of Tencent.

  • Sigh. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ledow ( 319597 ) on Monday September 10, 2018 @10:12AM (#57284222) Homepage

    "How living in a society where people think it's okay to stone people based on rumour, and the police are unable to stop or prosecute them Destroyed A Village"

    being the more accurate headline.

    Whatsapp did nothing more than allow people to communicate, no different to a book, radio, post-it notes or anything else.

    But if you live in a community where people will stone you to death without consequence, no amount - or absence - of technology can save you.

    • Whatsapp did nothing more than allow people to communicate, no different to a book, radio, post-it notes or anything else.

      Lots of other forms of communication have ways to track back to the author of the communication. So someone could have used radio to spread these rumors, but then law enforcement could track back the signal to how was broadcasting at that time, their location, etc. Yes, there are ways to obfuscate origination, but WhatsApp lowered that barrier significantly.

      • by ledow ( 319597 )

        Really?

        Because this is peer-to-peer communication, there's no central point putting out these rumours. Do you think the "vaccines cause autism" rumours were only done from a handful of identifiable sources or do you think they were passed from person to person?

        What about the Facebook posts I see about "this guy was photographed after trying to snatch a child" posts I see shared from friends once a week or so - I have absolutely no evidence that they were genuine either, but they got around, and they re-cir

        • You really, really, really don't want WhatsApp and similar services policing EVERYTHING you say on them, trust me.

          I'm not saying that WhatsApp should be policing everything. But creating a way to allow for law enforcement to gather evidence, after the fact, would be a deterrent to such behavior (assuming law enforcement would investigate).

    • by jeti ( 105266 )
      Sadly, this seems to happen in many societies. There are examples from England [dailymail.co.uk], Ireland [belfasttelegraph.co.uk] and Germany [www.welt.de].
    • Re:Sigh. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Monday September 10, 2018 @11:46AM (#57284850) Homepage Journal

      Let's stipulate that Facebook is not responsible for this development. It doesn't necessarily follow that Facebook has no responsibility to respond to it.

      My late father in law was in the Merchant Marine in WW2. One night one of his shipmates came through the mess with his blanket draped over his neck. "Get your life jackets on!" the shipmate said. "The captain's called abandon ship!"

      The men in the mess laughed at the joke, and then suddenly my father-in-law realized: his shipmate was sleepwalking, and thought his blanket was a lifejacket. He ran out after the man and pulled him back as he was climbing over the rail to jump into the sea.

      Now was it my father-in-law's fault that his sleepwalking shipmate was about to throw himself into the North Atlantic in the middle of the night? No. But did my father-in-law have a duty to save him once he realized what was going on? Most people would say "yes".

      So it's clear that fault isn't the only way you can acquire a duty to act.

      But if you live in a community where people will stone you to death without consequence, no amount - or absence - of technology can save you.

      This doesn't follow at all. Nothing modifies human behavior more powerfully than being seen and noticed.

      Think lynchings are alien to our culture? Then why does our language have a word for them? Lynchings in the US were a commonplace event; not just blacks were victims, it was commonly meted out to Irish too. The reason that public lynching declined in the US was the adoption of communication technologies and media which spread the news and images of lynching fast and far. The negative attention this brought ended the phenomenon of public lynchings with tacit official acceptance. The last time it happened with probable law enforcement complicity was back in 1965.

  • Lunatics lynching people based on rumor destroyed a village.

  • Zuckerberg and his team of Silicon Valley-based executives failed to foresee its malignant applications: misinformation, propaganda, rumor, hate.

    I don't think that's particularly unique to Facebook executives. I'm not defending or attacking them in this case but am making a separate point. Silicon Valley companies historically have had something of a blind spot for the negative ways in which technology ends up being used sometimes. Entrepreneurs tend to be optimistic sorts of people because they kind of have to be to take the financial risks they do. They also tend to be engineers and engineers (I are one) as a general proposition tend to think

  • by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Monday September 10, 2018 @10:29AM (#57284330) Journal

    So what's the alternative?
    Basically, the OP is saying "these darn stupid people, WhatsApp is guilty of letting them talk to each other".

    Should we then manage our communication channels to prevent stupid people* from communicating? Isn't this what Twitter/Youtube/FB/etc are trying to do?
    *according to our very-personal definition of stupid

    You may agree with what Twitter et al are doing because you hate Trump and Alex Jones etc...but if you can't see the pernicious and corrosive effect of that slippery slope, think about what life would be like if that principle becomes universalized and someone like Trump or Alex Jones is RUNNING the Twitter/FB/Youtube company?

    The Founding Fathers are rolling in their graves.

    • by BWS ( 104239 )

      Solution is that India will ban WhatApp, and adopt something similar to WeChat..

    • So what's the alternative?
      Basically, the OP is saying "these darn stupid people, WhatsApp is guilty of letting them talk to each other".

      Should we then manage our communication channels to prevent stupid people* from communicating? Isn't this what Twitter/Youtube/FB/etc are trying to do?
      *according to our very-personal definition of stupid

      Thirty years ago, that was the norm. Newspapers, radio, and television were nearly pure push mediums. Sure you could write a letter to the editor, or call in to a radio show, but almost no one ever did, in per capita terms. A huge fraction of each of those audiences was purely passive. By definition, the "stupid" people could not communicate with each other, since newspapers and radio shows exercised draconian editorial control about which letters they would publish, or even how much of a letter to publ

  • Now the interesting thing with WhatsApp, if they have the encryption done the way they say it's done (with messages encrypted before they leave your phone, only to be decrypted by the recipient), the company staff can not read the messages in any way. Not being able to read the messages Facebook doesn't know what's being communicated on their WhatsApp platform, so even if they wanted to control this kind of rumours/misinformation there's nothing they can do. At all.

    Except maybe WhatsApp groups. I don't know

  • by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Monday September 10, 2018 @10:32AM (#57284346) Journal

    As stanky as Facebook is, it's not responsible for third worlders rioting, killing people based on rumors, etc.

    As I kept saying about the stupid Russian ads, if you believe random crap that you see on facebook, YOU are the problem, not Facebook.

    It's Facebook. It's just a freaking multi-user blog site. It has no magical powers over you that you don't choose to give it.

  • Blaming WhatsApp is like blaming the cellphone providers for this massacre: it was merely a communications tool used to coordinate and facilitate violence. Should the cellphone companies share responsibility for not shutting down communications? Or more troubling, should both WhatsApp and the cellphone companies be responsible for monitoring every communication and try to identify and censor any speech that could lead to violence? Even if you think that's a good idea, privacy be damned, how do you actual
  • It was foreseen (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RobinH ( 124750 ) on Monday September 10, 2018 @11:28AM (#57284720) Homepage

    I can remember reading a well reasoned post on slashdot, back around 2000, where the author basically said, the future of the internet isn't a Muslim and a Jewish person having a reasoned debate online (a la Locke and Demosthenes from Ender's Game), it was actually going to be one trolling the other with a picture of their prophet swathed in bacon, and honestly that's clearly come to pass.

    I understand why the people building the internet in their ivory towers though it would enlighten and uplift the human race. They were so wrong. I've long since deleted my Facebook and recently my Twitter account, but I'm still wary as I walk around town that I might say or do something "wrong" and have my picture taken and posted online for community shaming. Worse yet, someone who's ticked off at me might make an unsubstantiated claim against me and thanks to the court of public opinion, my career and family life could be ruined.

    We've certainly succeeded in empowering the rabble. The uplifting that was supposed to happen turn out of be opposite.

    • I can remember reading a well reasoned post on slashdot, back around 2000, where the author basically said, the future of the internet isn't a Muslim and a Jewish person having a reasoned debate online (a la Locke and Demosthenes from Ender's Game)...

      Pfffffft. Ender's Game has come to pass. Remember, Locke and Demosthenes were sock puppets, created for the sole purpose of furthering the political career of a scheming sociopathic child named Peter Wiggin. Only Locke was written as a reasoned debater. Demosthenes was written as a firebrand demogogue. Peter eventually became Hegemon of Earth.

      Take a look at the Internet. That shit happened, word for word, and it worked.

      • by RobinH ( 124750 )
        As I recall, they were at least debating political opinions. Yes, Demosthenes was a rabble rouser and espousing the popular opinions to get people stirred up. I guess you can compare that to Trump and others, but something about that comparison doesn't seem right. Where in Ender's Game was the mob of people following them around doxing people and issuing death and rape threats? I don't think that was portrayed in the book. Did Demosthenes incite violence? Having an emotionally charged debate about, e.
  • by Ukab the Great ( 87152 ) on Monday September 10, 2018 @12:02PM (#57284982)

    The Malleus Maleficarum, the book on how to out rumored witches and caused thousands of women to be burnt at the stake in Renaissance Europe, was spread so widely by the invention of Gutenbergâ(TM)s printing press.

    Did Gutenberg forgo his mandatory social responsibility to prevent inciteful things from being printed?

  • On December 4, 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch, a 28-year-old man from Salisbury, North Carolina, fired three shots in the restaurant with an AR-15-style rifle, striking walls, a desk, and a door.[40][41][42] Welch later told police that he had planned to "self-investigate" the conspiracy theory.[43] Welch saw himself as the potential hero of the story—a rescuer of children.[44] He surrendered after officers surrounded the restaurant and was arrested without incident.[45] No one was injured.[46]

    • Let's compare that to the "hands up don't shoot" lie which also spread through social media, and ultimately ended in innocent people getting killed or hospitalized due to revenge attacks. Of course that doesn't benefit any narrative we'd like to promote, so never mind. Let's single someone else out.
  • If backwards folk lie to other backwards folk and provoke a murder then I know where I'm apportioning blame and it certainly isn't the telephone/letter/telegram/radio/WhatsApp.
  • WhatsApp doesn't kill people; people kill people.

1 1 was a race-horse, 2 2 was 1 2. When 1 1 1 1 race, 2 2 1 1 2.

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