How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village | Hacker News Reader

How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

buzzfeednews.com

170 pointsgernblanstonne147 comments

The real problem here is that these services (twitter, fb, whatsapp, etc.) are designed for use by educated, urban people who know the basics of tech. And they are then marketed to uneducated people in remote areas to reach growth metric targets that Zuck and co can fling around at their next meeting.

In the west and in the urban areas of SE Asia, these problems do not occur because the users are educated enough to understand how this all works and are less likely to fall for all these fake news and child kidnapping videos.

Now, in remote villages, the people are not educated in technology. People who don't have access to electricity and TV suddenly find themselves using Social Media. These people don't have an idea that videos and images can be faked using Photoshop and such. So they take these at face value.

In real world communications, people have developed a system of verification and trust. When someone speaks about such things, you generally ask questions like the source for the information. Then you decide whether it is a source that you trust.

Whatsapp has no such system to find and verify the source of information. There is no trust model. The basic assumption is that the person in your trust zone is sending you this information.

Combine this with the fact that the videos hit the base instincts of humanity (safety, especially of your children) and you have a recipe for disaster.

> The real problem here is that these services (twitter, fb, whatsapp, etc.) are designed for use by educated, urban people who know the basics of tech. And they are then marketed to uneducated people in remote areas to reach growth metric targets that Zuck and co can fling around at their next meeting.

I'm deeply disappointed that your comment is on the top in this discussion! As one of the "educated and urban" people, I take umbrage at this completely ridiculous and nonsensical statement. The fact that you can even make such a statement as an "educated and urban" person says a lot about the pathetic thinking in urban circles. FWIW, I have seen many so called "educated and urban" people also falling for various WhatsApp scams and fake news. While knowledge of technology may be poorer among uneducated people "in remote areas", it's not unique to them alone. You'd know that urban dwellers aren't immune by any means to these things if you had followed the news on lynchings and other mob attacks in cities.

Before you start arguing further, are you even aware how many urban people fall for all the sensational and fake debates on TV that are just meant to get ratings up, create controversies and tensions? Where is your (or anyone's) focus or acknowledgment on those?

Not really. Almost all of WhatsApp related lynchings are from villages. The OP's point is that one app cannot fit all. To give you one silly point to understand; These are the people who are online for the first time. They still are in the 'click here to talk to online hotties in your area' level scam. A regular internet user would know that this is fake. Not them!

Patently false and just a way to whitewash the crime. Here are lynching/mob attack examples from Indian cities:-

1. Gurgaon : https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/muslim-meat-selle...

2. Hyderabad: https://www.firstpost.com/india/mob-lynching-telangana-polic...

3. Jaipur: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/jaipur/25-year-old-...

4. Chennai: https://indianexpress.com/article/india/two-beaten-in-chenna...

5. Ahemdabad: https://www.news18.com/news/india/woman-beggar-lynched-on-su...

I specifically said almost. Look at the number of lynchings and count how many in cities. Even in cities it's not in the upper sections of the society. That's the point

I don't think we have to limit to India either. Americans used to lynch African Americans based on false crimes. Germans thought Jews as Boogeyman enough to conduct a genocide. It is human psychology, not just "poor illiterate third wolders"

He's saying uneducated in the context of technology (pretty much in those exact words). This means they don't know that what they are seeing in WhatsApp is fake and/or taken out of context. They don't know about common scams, or which sources are trustworthy/reputable. They don't know where to look to find out this information, either.

Sure there are plenty of people like that everywhere you look, but the proportion of them in urban areas is much lower and as such the probability of them finding each other and banding together for acts like this are much lower too.

There is a difference between an individual falling for a scam and a lynch mob. In the individual's situation they may not talk about to anyone, if they do many would be told it is a scam and wouldn't get scammed. In the story they are talking about it with others and there is no one saying "it's a scam/fake" so they reinforce their beliefs rather than have them challenged.

>FWIW, I have seen many so called "educated and urban" people also falling for various WhatsApp scams and fake news

How many have you seen beating people into a bloody dead pulp over a rumor?

It was basic savagery in these people that got those poor devils killed, not WhatsApp.

You're making an awful lot of assumptions of both "educated, urban people" and "uneducated people in remote areas". We're all human and we all fall for these kinds of myths, just different ones.

Just look at "red pilling". Even with university level education it's easy to fall for various forms of propaganda, especially when it's "just the facts". White supremacists will happily cite "factual" crime statistics to nudge you into the direction of race realism and it takes conscious effort to understand that even if the numbers are 100% authentic that doesn't mean you can derive any useful solution if you just stop at "crime == black".

Everyone believes their life experience or education or "street smarts" means they're rational thinkers and can't be fooled. Then they get fooled. If we're lucky they realize it eventually. If not, they end up killing people.

One word: Pizzagate

My parents are far from being uneducated, but even they believe that any forward sent through WhatsApp is actually from the authority figure mentioned in the message.

Messages usually exploit this by mentioning how "XYZ warning" is according to scientists at NASA/MIT/IIT. My parents - who are both in their 70s - believe that these messages actually originated from NASA/MIT, etc.

I don't know how to fight this. I've tried explaining it to my parents yet they don't get it.

I can't even imagine how hard it would be to dispel these myths and beliefs among uneducated people.

The only way to stop this quick is to remove forwarding systems. If people have to make some non trivial effort to share stuff, that effort and time will be saved only for important stuff. No will spend time typing all this click bait for every single recipient.

We can try education but that will take at least a generation or two to take effect.

This is a problem that can take care of itself if left alone. It's resolvable only with experience. If not, we'll enable worse problems - oppressive governments.

I remember when first got online, I fell for every "make money online scheme." The experience thought me to subconsciously / automatically ignore them.

Rather than spend unnecessary resources on a technical solution or filter, lets inoculate them.

FAKE NEWS INOCULATION

Create more ridiculous rumors that can easily be debunked.

WhatsApp and other platforms can randomly spam their users with these lies and at the end of the message, write - its a joke, April fool or whatever.

With this, we'll get to nirvana in half the time, with 10% effort and resource.

> WhatsApp and other platforms can randomly spam their users with these lies and at the end of the message, write - its a joke, April fool or whatever.

I worry that would have the opposite effect - it would train people to look for that, then assume messages that _don't_ have it are real.

I just saw your message, but this is a brilliant idea.. assuming you can get people to finish watching to the end, so it doesn't backfire!

I could also imagine gamifying... tie the Report button to in-store credit or some kind of "debunker" badge, to reward people guessing that videos are hoaxes.

You’re right, but the problem is not with those apps. Before that, all that garbage was forwarded through e-mails.

My dad used to drive me crazy forwarding hoaxes. But in his case, it was because he knew it will, and found it amusing. As he told me « I only forward you a 10th of what I receive ! »

That’s a bit of a heavy club. I forward dozens of messages every day and it would really suck to lose these features in software because some psychos are misusing it. Why not root out and eliminate the psychos?

Agreed. The only way is to restrict the virality. You can still retain the original intent of the feature by allowing single forwards (simply tag forwarded messages and don't allow them to be forwarded).

Try making a similar video yourself and sending it to them?

Even better, send them one from a power they absolutely trust telling them to disregard all other messages.

These "unsophisticated" people in India love their kids as people do everywhere and don't want them to get kidnapped and gang raped. Which does seem to happen an awful lot and can be read about in old media newspapers every day.

Instead of blaming WhatsApp maybe the Indian government can start to make people feel safe.

I must point out that in most cases child abuse happens inside families. A stranger kidnapping a child is a rather rare occurrence. Prevention, giving kids a chance to get help, ban of child-marriages etc will help, tough laws and hard punishment will not.

I am well aware of that, my country spends billions every year on child protection and it barely makes a dent it seems. But this is India were public safety is lacking and kidnapping is not so rare. And instead of doing the hard thing we are here talking about WhatsApp.

So they lynch 5 strangers on the off chance they're criminals?

OP was not saying that "unsophisticated" people in India don't love their kids and want them to be gang raped.

> Combine this with the fact that the videos hit the base instincts of humanity (safety, especially of your children) and you have a recipe for disaster.

The Pizzagate gunman is from a supposedly educated country. Let's not pretend that this problem only affects faraway villagers. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/22/533941689...

Seen this first hand with a good friends brother in Kashmir reposting ketchup is made from all kinds of gross stuff except tomatoes.

This is terrible but blaming WhatsApp is misplaced. If it wasn't WhatsApp, it would have been another service. Either it will be easy to communicate or it won't be. If it is, it can be used as a force for good or a force for evil. The real problem is so much more difficult that it's easy to try to find something you can do, block the technology, so you feel like you are doing something even if it's completely ignoring the root of the issue.

> This is terrible but blaming WhatsApp is misplaced. If it wasn't WhatsApp, it would have been another service.

I feel this is a worthwhile piece. It spends considerable time exploring the issues of end-to-end encryption and enhanced privacy and their relationship to the problem of lynchings. It details how whatsapp became more than a mere P2P messaging service in this community. It was the primary source of news, like Facebook but completely private and impervious to intervention. Thus all the negative stuff we've heard about how FB affected our elections, which everybody is ok with "blaming FB" for.. imagine that 10X and actually facilitating lynchings.

Often we've heard that "terrorists will just use another service" but lynch mobs are a different case much more closely tied to the popularity of a social network. WhatsApp has become that and it has also led the charge to make everything super private and impervious to law enforcement.

To be clear, I completely see the positive aspects of E2E encrypted systems and welcome them in my life. But I think it we should support journalistic explorations of the consequences of these systems, especially as they grow beyond simple P2P communication and become the primary source of news in a community, which is the case here.

The real problem in this instance is not technology but a lack of education. Whatsapp is of course an enabler and an easy scapegoat. But mob lynchings have been happening in India's backwards areas for decades. People used to beat up "witches", "thieves" etc to death for long before Whatsapp was a thing. People would kill their own children because a "Godman" told them so.

This will keep on happening whether they police whatapp or block it altogether unless these people are educated and are allowed to develop a modicum of trust in the law enforcement agencies.

So when Indians believe propaganda and kill a group of travelers, that's a lack of education.

What is it when white Americans invade an Italian restaurant in search of child abuse or harass firefighters and grieving parents while accusing them of being "crisis actors"?

it's not lack of education in either case. It's just how people are. You believe lies, I believe lies, everyone does - the only reason we feel we can point at mob lynchings and say "backwards!" but look at our own problems (e.g. political riots) and say otherwise is because of differences in culture and perspective.

> The real problem in this instance is not technology but a lack of education.

But WA could certainly help with this education, maybe in the same sense it educates you that a conversation is E2E encrypted. The app could easily provide a clear warning and an additional page with concrete examples of abuse/misuse and dangers.

people have a tendency to ignore in-app warnings. Steam puts at message at the top of every chat telling you not to give out your password, but after noticing it once or twice it just blends into the background. The lesson won't stay in the forefront of your mind.

The thing is... around fifteen years ago there was still at least a semblance of support for folk who were researching these very problems.

When the current culture of "hyper growth at all costs" promulgated by the unholy trinity of goo-face-azons came along they were the first to be made to feel unwelcome.

Agree. As much as I don't like Facebook and by extension WhatsApp[0] I still think we should be fair.

[0]: to the point where I've encouraged (or rather tried to convince) groups moving to other channels.

Either it will be easy to communicate or it won't be.

But ease-of-use is only one product dimension. Different tools encourage different modes of communication. The kind of discourse and the use cases of tool A and tool B will be different and which is better depends on what outcome you are trying to achieve - substantive debates for the good of humanity, or “engagement”.

That's the entire problem with this industry – we make the assumption that someone less ethical than us will come along and build the shitty product anyway, and use that as justification to do something we likely shouldn't.

Blaming WhatsApp is misplaced, in some sense – the blame lies with startup culture, and with each of us that choose to make that excuse.

Are you suggesting that basic text communication apps should not exist?

This is fundamentally very very simple functionality - there's no social media algorithms surfacing different content to different people or anything like that.

Are you seriously advocating that we should just disallow digital communication. (Not to mention advocating it using digital communication)

I didn’t get the sense that they were implying chat messengers should cease to exist. While they certainly could have been more explicit, I think that’s a rather uncharitable interpretation.

The larger conversation seems to be revolving around the question of “While we continue to build these infrastructures, are we currently—in a serious way— searching for ways to mitigate against these types of things from happening? And if not, why not?”

Which, from what we’re seeing— with how vulnerable many segments of populations seem to be, with misinformation and these types of mob behaviors—this is a timely and important question.

There are multiple organizations trying to find ways to stop misinformation but it seems next to impossible. What is the truth? Who gets to decide what is and isn't the truth? No doubt Google will come up with some API that reports if a statement is true or not and all algorithms will use it to hide any information google says is false.

"The shitty product" is text chat. We "likely shouldn't" build text chat? Startup culture is morally defective because it built text chat, and we share in the moral capability by "making excuses" for text chat?

Exactly. This is the tired old pattern of "humans do human things and technology is coincidentally involved because we live in the 21st century, obviously it's the technologies fault."

In many cases is genuinely is the technologies fault when it uses UI patterns to shape behavior and algorithmic sorting to selectively show ideas to the user. But that is not the case here.

The article mentions forwarded hoax videos:

“each said they’d done so after watching shocking videos on WhatsApp warning of outsiders abducting children.”

> "They said that as long as their children are safe, they have no regrets." [The lawyers of the murderers]

While in general I agree that everyone should share responsibility for maintaining a safe society that very feeling seems to be what these murderers were operating on. Given the lack of remorse I think it is clear that there is a deeper issue than unfiltered efficient communication in these communities.

In this case, I would blame lynch mob culture, not startup culture. No matter how these people received their misinformation, what they did was infinitely worse.

Yes, I don't see how this is on WhatsApp in the slightest unless we're going to say communication apps shouldn't exist...

There's no shortage of ignorance and gullibility offline--it's not something that was just invented with social media. It's easier to blame "startup culture" than have a hard look at the unpleasant parts of one's own culture.

> "Mob lynching isn’t a new phenomenon in India. According to some reports, there were more than 2,000 lynchings in India between 2000 and 2012 — well before WhatsApp was around."

I don't know, crazy idea: Maybe the blame should fall on... the people who think it's OK to lynch strangers.

The article makes it clear that the people of Rainpada are extremely uneducated, many lack literacy and tend to trust their tight-knit social groups. They don't see many locals, and they genuinely believed the strangers were harvesting organs. Try hard, and imagine being completely naive to internet hoaxes, and not even knowing how to read and write (note that the video had audio dubbing, precisely to target unsophisticated viewers.)

Western businesses don't have an inherent right to market their products in India. Group messenger apps, at least those lacking in sovereign moderation powers, are clearly causing harm in illiterate/hoax-naive demographics. Is India getting a deal that outweighs the human costs of violence, or should they develop their own?

If the government thinks the locals are unable to handle the internet then it should either educate them or restrict the usage.

they cut off internet access for 24 hours following the murder, and within two hours ordered the local news channel to air an admonishment about the misinformation on repeat, along with a warning for prosecution for further spreading it.

the village is now a ghost-town; most of the men fled, and the women and children stay inside. elders are ashamed to mention their hometown.

there are two educational efforts: the police have posted numerous warning signs in public areas, and a group of students are traveling around giving a play to demonstrate how spreading rumors on WhatsApp caused a lynching.

in addition to those efforts, what can WhatsApp do to keep this from happening? India is doing their part. If WhatsApp thinks it's unable to handle the situation, they should turn administrative control of their service over to the government.

WhatsApp already took some actions after getting forced by government. Now, in India, a user can not forward a message on WhatsApp to more than 5 contacts in one go. Earlier it was select as many as you wish, but now you can choose only 5 contacts.

That change only affects the latest version of the app. Only a single phone among those surveyed in the village by BuzzFeed was running the latest version. I'm not sure what Facebook can do about it technically, but the change won't be effective any time soon.

You're not wrong – part of the blame obviously lies there.

But even if it is simply enabling and perpetuating an existing problem, why haven't we asked ourselves why technology isn't addressing the issue? How is this future we've created any better? Because it's faster? Because the UI is nicer?

It's rare to see startup culture produce anything that I would call true innovation. Maybe I just have a higher bar than most folks. That could be what I'm arguing here, and that doesn't change the fact that you have a point – I just believe we have to do better.

Yea, I happen to agree with that too. Although I don't think WhatsApp is necessarily an unethical software, far too often, we see stories here of startups and bigger technology companies, totally tossing ethics aside in search of their "engagement" or "reach" or whatever stupid metric they're chasing. As software engineers "on the inside", we have both an obligation and unique opportunity to stop these things before they start. Or at the very least not contribute toward it.

For every unethical piece of software that gets written, there's at least one engineer... one of us, maybe even someone reading this very post... who said "Sure, boss, I could totally write that!"

This argument is invalid. Even more so after what happened in the 2016 US election. Silicon valley companies created the beast(s), they have an ethical obligation to tame it.

>The real problem is so much more difficult that it's easy to try to find something you can do, block the technology, so you feel like you are doing something even if it's completely ignoring the root of the issue.

Blocking WhatsApp would be a perfectly justifiable solution! Regulating it would be as well. Facebook and Google want to airdrop their products into all of these emerging markets for growth, ignoring all the negative externalities until someone holds them accountable. None of these countries need to be fatalist about technology or these companies.

How is blocking WhatsApp justifiable (or indeed useful -- this could be accomplished with more or less any communications app)?

I know it pails in comparison, but the London riots of a few years ago were (in part) organised over BlackBerry Messenger. I don't recall many on HN advocating for blocking BlackBerry Messenger. I feel this comment from the time applies as much here as it did there:

> Neither Blackberry, Twitter, nor Facebook fuelled the fire under London's riots, any more than the internet, radio waves, or electricity did. Violent, hateful people did that.

WhatsApp is a text chat app. You are advocating just banning digital communication. This is inane.

If you're actually serious I'd love to hear your justification, but I feel like you just haven't thought about this very hard.

Dude, nobody is arguing that we should ban digital communications at all. Take off the tinfoil hat, chicken little. What I'm suggesting is that if we are going to make PLATFORMS available (i.e. WhatsApp) that are capable of amplifying and making individual communications instantaneous, we mightttt need some more thought, collectively, about how to combat fucked up human nature. Like, just a pinch of consideration for the fact that the notion of free speech didn't evolve during a time in which any asshole could pull a thought out of their ass, hit send, anonymously, and reach a thousand people.

EDIT: Sorry, I realize that I was speaking condescendingly here. I'm just trying to get the point across that asking us to actually solve the hard problem of platforms before unleashing them on the world shouldn't be too big a burden to bear. Some (myself included) would argue that our entire society is destabilizing because of the lack of ingenuity in solving this problem. It gets frustrating.

The “lack of ingenuity” in regulating speech is a hard-fought, hard-won tenet of liberal democracy that a citizen ought to be willing to sacrifice his life to protect. Arguments about the need for paternalistic stewardship to protect the masses from their flawed human nature are bog-standard apologia from authoritarian regimes seeking to justify repression.

Did I say "regulating speech"? No. If we're going to try to have a cogent conversation, please stop putting words in my mouth.

Free speech != the right to a platform, which is synonymous with saying that, just because you have a voice doesn't mean your message has immediate merit, or that it is the truth, or that people have to give your voice equal weight to others, or that people have to listen to you.

You cannot compel a platform to carry a message against its will. This is true.

Restricting the messages a platform may carry according to the state's view of merit or truth, on the other hand, is exactly "regulating speech."

EDIT: To be clear, I am responding in the context of the upthread "Blocking WhatsApp would be a perfectly justifiable solution! Regulating it would be as well." Your argument seems less puzzling in the context of the very different assertion that Whatsapp itself should exercise editorial control. Apologies if this is what you meant.

The problem is that there's no solution to "deplatforming" people who incite lynch mobs that also doesn't give the power to "deplatform" peaceful protest against repressive regimes. You can't come up with a knife that only cuts what you want it to cut.

I'm pretty sure poster above is taking for granted that they (or other like-minded) would also wield the knife.

What if there aren't any technical solutions that are likely to work, and no top-down regulatory solutions that are likely to be worth the cost? What if the only mitigation that works is "culture change?" Culture change is messy and slow and self-directed.

Accountable... for letting people send text to each other?

Shall we block or regulate the printing press? Hold its inventors and users accountable for its negative externalities? After all, none of these countries/churches need to be fatalistic about the printed word or these heretics...

Printing creates a barrier to entry. You have to have enough conviction in your idea and determination to actually write the statement, lay it out, and print and distribute it. You don't just type "oh shit closeparen should be hanged lmao," hit send, and reach 100 people.

Please don't copy and paste what you posted elsewhere. That lowers the signal/noise ratio.

So we should just ban the internet because some village in india couldn't use it right?

This comment breaks the site guidelines, which ask: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

If you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

WhatsApp didn't destroy a village. People did, like they have always done when they've believed some random threat to be true, without checking the facts or doing some investigation. All that technology, be it WhatsApp or any other platform, has done is made it easier and quicker for such rumors to spread.

What's required is a government initiative like on the lines of this educational video in this article. [1] There's no point trying to control WhatsApp or block it. If not WhatsApp, something else will take its place, and it'd be like an endless game of whack-a-mole. Hope the government focuses on awareness initiatives more than anything else. In India, we don't need further censorship, Internet shutdowns and such. We have too much of those already. (I know this statement will offend many people, but please examine facts first, starting with a search online)

[1]: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/e28058d5-13d9-4752-98a1-d8bba84...

I agree with you on the People being responsible for lynching, but I do not think awareness initiatives will be sufficient in the short term. As they will take generations to come into full effect.

Instead greater respect for the law is more important. No matter what the people had thought about the five strangers they didn't have the power or the right to punish them.

It will be a lot more viable to educate them to respect certain non ambiguous laws, such as murder being a crime regardless of what you think about the other person. While judging authenticity of a piece of information can be ambiguous and will take time to become affective.

We shouldn't blame WhatsApp, but Facebook should try to work together with the local government if they haven't. This has been going on for a while:

> 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.

I was in Made, Netherlands, this summer and saw they had per-neighborhood/per-street signs for WhatsApp groups that the police monitored. I thought that was a little rich for such an isolated berg - the biggest crimes there probably deserve harsh looks and muttering.

Next day, walking around Leverkusen, I saw the same thing. I asked around but my ability to ferret out who paid for these signs was exceeded by my desire to be anonymous.

They had a group for this when I was living in Hoofddorp. From memory they called it "Buurtpreventie" which I suppose translates into "Neighbourhood Watch" really. It's just a new evolution of what has existed for ages. It allows faster communication rather than Jan calling Sanne who calls Peter to inform that someone isn't taking their bins out on the correct day.

Technically it means "prevention of neighbourhood" which is obviously kind of silly.

I first thought you meant that the police monitored the groups nonconsensually in order to track the residents' activities, but then I realized you probably meant that the police are actively invited to participate in the groups in order to receive reports from the residents—is that right?

That's how it works. The local beat officer is usually invited in. I'm glad no one in my neighbourhood came up with this idea yet. It really irks me that a commercial entity dominates our public spaces to the level of bleeding street signs.

If you live in one of those neighbourhoods you either participate (meaning you are required to purchase an Android or IOS smartphone, and required to register an account with Facebook's WhatsApp) or get left out of the loop completely. So much for freedom to choose.

From what I've heard from people that do live in such neighbourhoods is that these group chats are a constant distraction of irrelevancies spammed by a handful of very active users. Successfully moderated groups of this type seem rare.

I don't think police is usually in these groups; it's just intended as a warning sign for potential, say, burglars, that the people in the neighbourhood are watching out for each other.

In practice, these groups are sometimes used by the racist neighbour to "warn" their neighbours of dark-skinned people walking around. And it's useful for organising neighbourhood events.

This is an India problem more than a Whatsapp problem and its been going on long before Whatsapp existed. Rural india and even Pakistan have a serious mob justice mentality.

I'm pretty sure things like this happened in villages waaaay before WA came about. This is more old world than new word. WA is a very simple application that doesn't really, in itself, encourage anything specific.

I would think that it's greater access to mobile phones and mass communication than Whatsapp itself that's the problem.

Intrinsically, the same thing could happen with SMS.

Its funny how sometimes you get a juxtaposition between 2 articles hitting the front page. This one reminded me of this article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17947264 and in particular the author's comment > do not underestimate the destructive power of lies This seems to be much more of an issue than the fact they used Whatsapp to spread lies.

The platform is what spread those lies – without the platform, those lies wouldn't have had the reach they did.

As mentioned in the article "Mob lynching isn’t a new phenomenon in India. According to some reports, there were more than 2,000 lynchings in India between 2000 and 2012 — well before WhatsApp was around."

I agree that WhatsApp has the potential to exacerbate such issues.

Because rumor mongering came about only with whatsapp, and gossiping with your neighbours is a phenomenon born straight from instant messaging.

People spread lies. Not platforms or machines. People. Via whatsapp, other IM services, email, printed leaflets, handwritten notes or voice. People do that.

"“Messages about child abductors sent over WhatsApp can be misleading and we request you to not fall for them,” it said in Marathi. “Anyone caught indulging in violence or spreading these messages will be arrested and prosecuted.”"

"... be warned: If you spread them, the police will arrest you!"

That sounds like an awfully good way to make sure that people believe in all that stuff without saying it out loud. After all, if it wasn't true, why are "they" trying to crack down on it? It's a very common line of thought, unfortunately.

I suspect that the culture there has different norms regarding police censorship and control.

Australians see no problem with invasive police searches of cars and breathalyzers being administered without probable cause. Americans see no problem with a murder suspect's photo and name being broadcast on television, while the same act would horrify Dutch people.

Different cultures are different.

It's not about acceptance of censorship. Even cultures that don't necessarily see it negatively (I'm from one myself) still exhibit this mode of thinking - i.e. yes, some things need to be censored, but when something that you believe in is being censored, that just proves that it's true (and important).

>The videos, whose origins are impossible to trace because of WhatsApp’s strong encryption, ...

So? The problem isn't that the videos exist but that people are spreading them without knowing they are true in any sense. Each and every person that forwarded the video is responsible for the results of their entirely deliberate action. In many countries, spreading hate is straight up illegal. Why should people be let off the hook just because it is done on the internet?

> Nobody in my village reads or watches TV. They only get updates from WhatsApp

> two burly police officers marched into the tiny newsroom of AE Vision, a local cable news channel...Write down this text, and broadcast it to your viewers.

Strange strategy from the local authorities if they want to fight this threat effectively. What happens after the 24 hours Internet ban?

In my opinion, the messages inciting violence should have been countered from the start (1 month ago?) with factual videos on the same media. If Whatsapp (or any similar app), can be used for evil, then it can also, as effectively be used for good. Why wasn't it done? Is the police really unaware of how things work in these rural areas (no literacy, no tv watching)?

Blaming WhatsApp is easy, but it is the ideology that should be getting attacked here. I will bring in viewpoint relevant to Indian minorities here. They are under exceptional threat in India right now, and they don't have resources or means to counter the propaganda being rained on them. Current party ruling India, BJP, is beholden to a group with fascist ideologies, RSS [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. RSS views Muslims and Christians as aliens to India, and Islam as something which was brought to India by force, and christianity by forced conversions of missionaries. They want to root out these religions. Even more sinister is their outlook towards indigenous religions i.e. Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism. They consider it to be their own branch. In short, anything not Hinduism is open to be eliminated. They have penetrated educational institutes, installed Deans in Universities and snubbed out dissidents and independent voices.

So much so that RSS held a conference in Chicago, World Hindu Congress, where RSS chief openly called Indian minorites as pests and dogs from outside who can destroy the lions (Hindus) [6]. This is the sweets box they gave to each and every participant [7]. They also pointed out how inter-faith marriages is a danger to Hindus [8]. This outright fascism was aired on US soil. This fascist organisation has patronage of ex-President of India too. Worse, they don't like Hindus having interfaith marriages, which is a way of saying don't marry Muslims.

Another is the incestous relationship between Twitter and WhatsApp. Blue tick marks on Twitter frequently air bigoted messages that they receive on WhatsApp. Worse, these messages are screenshotted and then spread back on WhatsApp, now they carry an air of authenticity because it was tweeted by a blue tick mark. It is destroying the very social fabric of India and very much a danger to minorities of India.

1. https://www.straight.com/news/877876/gurpreet-singh-racism-r...

2. https://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1702/17020950.htm

3. https://www.ibtimes.com/hindu-nationalists-historical-links-...

4. https://www.huffingtonpost.in/2016/02/23/rss-subramanian-swa...

5. https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/hitlers-hindus-indias-nazi-l...

6. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/hindus-have-no-aspir...

7. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DmqLjkFWwAEvmRZ.jpg

8. https://thewire.in/communalism/world-hindu-congress-chicago-...

I am sorry, but how is any political ideology is in any way relevant to the article? There was no political intention nor any minority/majority religion behind these lynchings.

Thanks for your question. That political ideology started the lynching trend using WhatsApp as a misinformation medium. India witnessed widespread lynchings of people, mainly minorities, who were simply transporting cows, an animal considered holy by Hindus. So this modus operandi was used before, until it percolated further.

Wow. That was some dark patterns.

When looking into the cookie dialog most of it says it is required.

There is a "Reject all" button and it seems to be live but doesn't work.

I know this is going to be an inconvenient reminder for many folks, but: if you play any part in bringing software (or technology in general) into the world, you have an obligation to consider the moral, ethical, and political ramifications of what you are building at every single step of the way.

What happened in that village wasn't an accident – it was the result of careful "growth-hacking", design, product work, and engineering. It just didn't work as intended.

There is no such thing as a neutral line of code, feature, notification, design, business, or product. Full stop.

What exactly is "growth hacking" in a chat app? There were no ads here, no algorithmic timeline, no perverse incentives, nothing that you could potentially consider as malicious.

What should WhatsApp have done?

Every single post about WhatsApp here has people pontificating about this and that but no one offers any suggestion of what should be done.

What exactly is "growth hacking" in a chat app?

WhatsApp is a fairly direct clone of BBM and BBM’s growth hack for want of a better term was to make its users feel like part of an exclusive in-group.

Yes, to the extent that every chat app is a clone of every other chat app, WhatApp is a clone of BBM. Other than that, what exactly are the similarities?

The whole point of WhatsApp is having a primary key that is your phone number. And they launched on literally all kinds of OSes that developing countries were using, including Symbian as late as 2012. So please tell me, how exactly is a service where you can message each other by their phone numbers and that was probably supported on the most number of platforms for its time "exclusive" and "in-group".

Sorry but you don't seem to have any idea what you are talking about.

> Sorry but you don't seem to have any idea what you are talking about.

Personal swipes like that will get you banned here, so please don't post those. Your comment would be fine without that bit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry but you don't seem to have any idea what you are talking about.

Perhaps you are unaware that BBM and hence WhatsApp are really about their group chat features?

Yeah, definitely no advertising, particularly overseas, that could have contributed to WhatsApp's growth. No features added like large groups that could be used to spread disinformation. WhatsApp chats are used to influence advertising, so that goes out the window. This happened because WhatsApp provided the means for it to happen – and you can speculate all day long about whether some other app would have made it possible, and whether it would have happened, but what you're saying is speculation, and what I'm citing are facts.

None of it was intentionally malicious – but not considering the moral, ethical, political ramifications of how your product will be used is negligent. This is negligence, not malice.

Platforms aren't neutral.

The logical conclusion of this perspective is that human beings should not be allowed to freely communicate in groups. I'd rather not live in your world.

Technology can't fix broken human beings. There is a moral failure here, but it isn't Facebook's. Blaming WhatsApp at best makes the real problem harder to fix, and at worst makes excuses for the actors in this horrorshow.

Speed and reach, my friend. Lynchings happened in the US a while ago, but they weren't a universal phenomenon. A platform with the speed and reach of WhatsApp makes disinformation more potent.

Nowhere in my post did I suggest human beings shouldn't be allowed to freely communicate – what I'm suggesting is that maybe we haven't built the right tools to enable that safely, and instead, we're exacerbating the "broken human beings" side of this issue.

> we're exacerbating the "broken human beings" side of this issue.

There is no other side of this issue. This could and probably have happened with sms. This is 100% the mob's fault.

SMS costs a lot in 3rd world countries. We are probably seeing these issues now because this is the first time these people have had access to cheap and easy communication. The rest of the world was eased in to it with email and the web but these countries are being dropped in to the deep end.

Subtext: You primitives aren't mature enough to communicate in groups without supervision.

Don't you find that an offensively paternalistic thing to tell whole societies?

By that logic we should ban megaphones as well.

You know what? Just ban shouting until people build the right tools to enable that safely.

Well if you start using a megaphone to encourage killing people you will have troubles in a few minutes. With whatsapp... Not that much. Whatsapp is probably the first medium of communication that is harf to monitor in many places. It is much safer to encourage hatred and violence there because you don't need physical interaction, it scales a lot and authorities cannot intercept it.

What are the right tools?

It's a chat application. How people can be so ignorant to abuse such a simple thing is beyond me. As much as I hate Facebook, I don't get how you can put this on WhatsApp.

From the looks of it, you could've achieved the same thing with someone printing and spreading around fliers. Doesn't mean a printing company selling printers should consider the "moral, ethical, political ramifications".

Printing creates a barrier to entry. You have to have enough conviction in your idea, and the determination to actually write the statement, lay it out, and print and distribute it. You don't just type "oh shit lxrbst should be hanged lmao," hit send, and reach 100 people.

You're basically describing why journalism is important, and still has an important place in our society.

Journalism is important, but not to the exclusion of other forms of communication. If your thrust is that barriers to entry for communication is good because it puts mass comm. powers in the hands of the few(er), I cannot agree.

Ironic to post such a comment in a platform that puts a high barrier for communication through moderation and guidelines.

Okay, but what about WhatsApp made this possible that wouldn't have been possible with plain old SMS/MMS? (Or even just the telephone? I guess no video over the telephone, but rumors and lies can certainly spread that way.) It's not like Facebook, where there's some kind of algorithmic curation. This is entirely peer-to-peer content distribution.

Sounds like the videos were very shocking and quickly forwarded - instigating a mob mentality:

“each said they’d done so after watching shocking videos on WhatsApp warning of outsiders abducting children.”

How are WhatsApp chats used to influence advertising? They are end to end encrypted.

That's partially true – but end-to-end encryption is different than zero-knowledge. I design the latter.

Although LifeHacker isn't a great source, they do a good job of pulling more credible sources together into this article: https://lifehacker.com/stop-using-whatsapp-if-you-care-about...

A chat app is about as neutral as platforms get. What specifically should they have done differently?

I haven't used whatsapp but from what I understand it's just an IM app. I'm not sure how an IM app can be responsible for this behavior. It simply lets users send messages to each other. There are no algorithms sorting what you see or promoting certain kinds of interactions. It seems that maybe some societies are far too trusting of baseless rumors and can't handle the fact that they are now able to share rumors incredibly fast.

Indeed, rural villages with low literacy rates aren't able to handle sharing rumors at the speed of light. This is precisely the discussion we're having!

Suddenly, high-speed internet is affordable even in places without reliable power. They can't spot fake news. They're unprepared for WhatsApp - do you blame them?

I'm not buying it, these people lynched somebody, this isn't about a lack of literacy. It's about being used to using violence as a way to solve problems.

The article mentioned that lynchings were unheard of in Rainpada prior to the introduction of WhatsApp and the spread of misinformation. Please cite your source for them "being used to using violence."

I blame them for murdering strangers, yes. Of course. It makes no difference how they were tricked into doing so, that’s practically irrelevant.

A: open communication and information never reaches them, we segregate them according to some prime directive, and they go on lynching each other and being backwards for all eternity until they arrive at internet #2 through convergent evolution.

B: open communication and information reach them, some use it for productive ends and some use it to mobilize lynchings, after 1~2 generations of adjustment, education, adaptation they largely outgrow and outeducate the worst of it.

C: How do you propose to regulate communication to find the best path that is neither fully A nor B?

The article mentions how:

“The next day, WhatsApp replied to the ministry, saying that it was “horrified by these terrible acts of violence,” but arguing that an effective solution to misinformation would require help from the government. WhatsApp pushed a few changes to the app, adding “forwarded” labels to re-sent messages, and limiting the number of people or groups a user could forward messages to in India to five.”

Simple: legally, treat WhatsApp groups as public message boards, and allow the local authorities to administer local WhatsApp groups the way you'd allow police to tear down signs put up on a cork-board in a public square.

It's not rocket science.

I agree it's not rocket science, it might be harder because we're dealing with human behavior.

The Salem witch hunts happened with full support of the "local authorities" to run investigations, interrogations, trials, and hangings. It was not for a lack of administration.

Next month when there's an article about a corrupt official extorting farmers, are we to say "at least farmers can't communicate or organize without authority oversight?"

Are you implying that whenever more than two people have a conversation on any chat application, the government should have the right to read along, for our own protection?

Do you live in India?

WhatsApp is produced by Facebook, an American company. It has to obey the US government. If WhatsApp wishes to operate in India, it should provide a mechanism for the Indian government to administer it.

If it doesn't, India is well within their rights to sanction them. There's no shortage of skilled tech workers in India; Facebook needs India more than India needs Facebook.

I do not. I don't live in the US either. Is that relevant?

I never suggested that WhatsApp doesn't have to obey the law in the countries it wishes to operate in. But it seems very strange to me that a discussion about the moral and ethical implications of software is now concluding with (paraphrasing you) "the solution is simple: whenever 3 people communicate online, they should be subject to government surveillance". Really? The developers of WhatsApp should have foreseen that people unaccustomed to the internet might kill people when sharing hoax videos, but you don't foresee any possible negative consequences to your proposed "simple" solution?

I think the cure you propose is worse than the disease, but if that is what India really wants then by all means let them pass a law to make it so. In that case I hope WhatsApp will create a separate app for India, because I wouldn't want to get into a group conversation with an Indian by accident.

Apart from that, I don't think your solution is as simple as you claim it to be. When people from different parts of India are in a group-chat, who is the local authority? What happens when some or all participants in a group chat move to a different place? If a foreigner visits India for one (minute/hour/day/week/month/year/decade), when do the local authorities get the right to enter all their group chats? Will they leave those chats when nobody remaining in the group chat is in India? Would this law apply to Indians abroad?

Nothing about a communication app inherently incites violence. It's the ass-backwardsness of the community that is the cause of this behavior. The answer is better education, not misplaced blame on technology. Would you have banned gossip and verbal and written testimonies in the Salem witch hunts?

I've done a lot of code reviews in my time and I've seen many, many neutral lines of code. So cut the hyperbole.

I wonder why this has been "flagged". It's relevant to this forum, it's about technological choices and their unintended consequences, and it's well written.

Maybe because it is Buzzfeed (News)?

Buzzfeed news is excellent. If you aren't aware of some of them, it's your loss, IMO.

(It's different from buzzfeed.com)

Why is this flagged? 1. negative about India 2. negative about Facebook 3. asks hard questioms sbout ethics & technology 4. all of the above

Negative about India. I have been receiving quite a bit of attention after posting India specific comments. And look how quickly it is dropping out from front page. Concerted effort.

Could you provide examples?

It's clickbaity as hell.

If anything, I wish it was more "negative" about India; instead of talking about why people take part in lynchings and why they are so common in the country, the blame goes to WhatsApp, which "has been getting Indians killed". It's as if the actual killers had no agency.

Same thing about the anti-vaccination groups in Brazil: as a Brazilian citizen my concern is that those groups exist at all and are affecting public health, not what app they happen to use.

The article is complete clickbait.

Rumour mongering/ scare stories has been an issue in rural villages world wide for far longer than the internet let alone Whatsapp.

In Africa it usually ends in the mob killing a supposed witch doctor. I suspect the same issues would happen in small town America if the police weren't as efficient.

Obviously an article about how technology doesn't automatically end superstition and ignorance is boring. Facebook/ Whatsapp is the new bogyman and Buzzfeed was never one to worry overly about facts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com