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.
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.
Facebook is not at fault for malfunctioning humans (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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Re: Facebook is not at fault for malfunctioning hu (Score:5, Insightful)
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 ...
Re: Facebook is not at fault for malfunctioning h (Score:3)
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.
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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.
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Let me get this right, you actively WANT a government censor to read your every message and come arrest you if they don't like what they see for any reason?
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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.
Re: Facebook is not at fault for malfunctioning hu (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: Facebook is not at fault for malfunctioning hu (Score:5, Funny)
The tragic consequences of a Civilization addiction....
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As somebody who actually is capable of tolerating the idea of other people having belief systems not my own: Some common root. Or Ben Carson is trolling us all. It turns out that once a group realizes you will believe any stupid rumor you hear about what they believe or do, they're going to see just how silly things have to get before you finally realize that you're being lied to and might wanna be properly sceptical of any claims made about any group by complete outsiders.
So, yeah, probably not a good id
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Re: Facebook is not at fault for malfunctioning h (Score:3)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It's a common historical legend, connected to the Joseph of the coat of many colors Bible story, which may be what interests evangelicals like Carson
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Re: Pizzagate (Score:4, Informative)
Quoting Wikipedia; "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."
So yes, he did shoot the place up.
Re: Pizzagate (Score:4)
Re: Facebook is not at fault for malfunctioning h (Score:3)
https://www.npr.org/sections/t... [npr.org]
And after all that the guy doesn't think he did anything wrong, he just "acted on wrong information".
Re: Facebook is not at fault for malfunctioning hu (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re: Facebook is not at fault for malfunctioning hu (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re: Facebook is not at fault for malfunctioning hu (Score:5, Insightful)
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].
Territorial vs. educational (Score:2)
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 ?)
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Sadly, the person who typed the above probably thinks he/she/it has a good education....
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So your problem with Mexicans isn't that they're trying to sneak across the border and pick produce so you can enjoy it below the minimum wage, its that they aren't invading your home and taking it by force...
You mean when the minority of white farmers Mexico allowed as guests refused to give up their slaves, when Mexico was against slavery. Fighti
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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
is it Richard Donners or Christopher Reeve's fault (Score:2)
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Worse (Score:2)
Give me a break. From a gullibility standpoint, WhatsApp is nothing more than a fucking newspaper.
With the difference that news papers have editorial boards, making WhatsApp even worse (and Facebook even worserer).
Either you're dumb and gullible enough to believe everything presented to you, or you are not. The medium doesn't matter.
But with newspaper, there's still the tiny chance that you happen to read one of the last newspaper that hasn't given up any attempt at ethics and still tries to at least make attempts in seemingly do their job.
Not every single last newspapers is a tabloid filled with 100% pure crackpot conspiracist theory and hate.
So even if you have no brain-filter, you might read a paper that attempts at no
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WhatsApp is a private messaging app. It's designed to replace SMS. Has SMS ever had "editorial boards"? Has email ever had them?
How about you either:
a) Just shut the fuck up
b) Take 5 seconds to google what WhatsApp even is
You are no smarter than the idiots that forward fake news over WhatsApp.
WhatsApp replaces SMS: thus NOT newspaper (Score:2)
WhatsApp is a private messaging app. It's designed to replace SMS. Has SMS ever had "editorial boards"? Has email ever had them?
How about you either:
a) Just shut the fuck up
b) Take 5 seconds to google what WhatsApp even is
Or maybe you could take 5 seconds to read a couple of lines further down my post :
I know that WhatsApp is a chatting app (all my friends happen to insist on using just that).
As the other AC remarked, I was merely pointing that because
The Socials Have to decide. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Addressing a plain harassment issue isn't the same as deciding that you don't need to be getting phone calls from Uncle Ted because he supports Trump.
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What does that have to do with this situation?
Also, most phone companies offer caller ID precisely so you can screen callers before picking up. It's rather necessary for them to stay in business.
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precisely so you can screen callers
What the socials are doing is deciding what you can or cannot see based on their own viewpoints.
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Well the phone companies cut off people who use their phones for spamming and other ToS violations too.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Re:Facebook is not at fault for malfunctioning hum (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Facebook is not at fault for malfunctioning hum (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Facebook is not at fault for malfunctioning hum (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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.
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_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.
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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'
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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
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Ignorance is bliss and these people are pissing bliss.
Those words apply equally to you.
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That would require a weak willed, if not entirely deliberate, misunderstanding of history and science.
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It's like you can read just enough to be outraged, but not enough to comprehend.
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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.
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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.
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The cure to ignorance is knowledge and easily is cured. The problem is willful ignorance and its continuance.
How dare they! (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Why the [one sided] verbiage? (Score:2)
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.
Rumours (Score:2)
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Found another Facebook employee!
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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
Wat (Score:2)
How fuckwits decided to randomly murder (Score:3)
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.
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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".
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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].
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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
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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
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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.
WeChat (Score:3)
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)
"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.
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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.
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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
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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).
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Re:Sigh. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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.
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https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/... [mirror.co.uk]
Where an unarmed lynch mob (however, in this case, "right" they were) killed a guy, in India, who tried to kidnap a girl at gunpoint.
Your guns do not stop lynch mobs. They merely amplify the situation, not solve it. You *hope* that you amplify it out of bounds to mutually-assured destruction and that all parties recognise that. That's NOT always the case, and NOT always possible, and NOT always better than the outcome otherwise.
Now, if the lynch mob had managed to get hol
Facebook did nothing (Score:2)
Lunatics lynching people based on rumor destroyed a village.
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"Facebook did nothing" - this may actually be part of the problem.
Optimism versus reality (Score:2)
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
What's the implication? (Score:3)
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.
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Solution is that India will ban WhatApp, and adopt something similar to WeChat..
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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
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While I think you're trying to be clever, I actually AGREE with you.
Those are private businesses, they are absolutely ENTITLED to make the choice of who they allow and who they don't. Absolutely. And if their best long term financial interest is to ban Jones - and even Trump - then they should do it. It doesn't even have to be in their interest - they're private firms, they can make that decision for WHATEVER reason.
You know, like a baker can decide who they bake a cake for.
Or a golf course can decide th
There's nothing Facebook/WhatsApp can do, really. (Score:2)
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
it's a stupid website/app (Score:3)
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.
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Ok, so most of humanity is the problem, what do we do next? How do we solve this/
Blaming WhatsApp is like Blaming the Telcos (Score:2)
It was foreseen (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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Gutenberg (Score:3)
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?
Ohh those poor people who are so easily duped.... (Score:2)
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]
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Don't shoot the messenger! (Score:2)
You know what they say: (Score:2)
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