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Comment by gooddelta | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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?

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