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Comment by fareesh | Hacker News Reader

- Because Indian in this context is not a reference to the ethnicity but of location - i.e. it's not the DNA of the people that is Indian, it's the borders in which they are physically present while hacking. Many are unaware that India has a lot of phenotype diversity in its 1 billion people. There are dark skinned people in the south, light skinned people in the north, and almond shape eyed people in the east. Merely saying "Indian" does not really paint an image of anyone since we all look different, so it's a bit strange to allege racism.

- Because just mentioning it adds the following dimensions to the headline: geopolitics, outsourcing, human resources in the developing world, cybercrime & jurisdiction challenges

- Because it's allegedly true

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This is a comment from this thread itself:

"I think it's covered in the Dark Basin episode of Darknet Diaries, but India apparently has a reputation for especially aggressive private investigators, who were historically used to dig up dirt on families before committing to marriage pacts, but in the modern era are used regularly for PR and corporate blackmail. Apparently this practice is ingrained enough into the culture that digging up dirt on people by any means necessary is widely accepted, and not even illegal in most contexts."

Please tell me more about how India can ever be used purely as a location.

I'm not sure I follow the point that is being made here

The comment is referring to the standard practices of private investigators in this country, and the nature of the corporate world based on what has been seen in some TV show

What's the problem with this?

Hypothetical example: I once watched a documentary about Africa and smuggling of ivory and it showed X, Y and Z. What does this mean? That because of this documentary I have a bias about Africa which now shapes all my decision making? Where does that line get drawn? I consumed the information, what does that have to do with how it affects my opinion of the people there?

If you can't see a problem in making a broad stroke judgment on the culture of a billion people on the basis of a single documentary, I am not sure that I can have a conversation with you. Have a good day.

Racism does not have to focus on skin color. As a super easy example, with Nazi did not defined races and their hierarchy by color.

Also notably, people that have a thong against Indians and Asians I encountered in real life have literally zero idea about internal subdivision. They could not tell sub-groups apart, not by look and not by language. If you have a thing against people from India, it is India in general and you don't care about anything else.

The publisher here (Reuters) is well aware of everything I've mentioned. They don't need to customize their headlines to modify the reaction of the people you are referencing. Those people should not be leading the decision making process for excluding facts from headlines.

>They don't need to customize their headlines to modify the reaction of the people you are referencing

Why not? Doesn't media regularly customize their headlines to avoid stating factually true things that would propagate negative stereotypes against minorities and other protected groups?

I think most responsible media organizations do avoid putting headlines like "Muslim man stabs three in church in Nice". Even if they do mention the religion, it is usually called "Islamic terrorism", and they have also invested quite some significant effort into emphasizing that most of regular Islamic people do not in fact have anything to do with Islamic terrorism.

As far as I can tell, media companies certainly seem to be aware of the effect their headlines can have on propagating negative stereotypes and good editorial judgement usually involves an attempt to avoid doing that as much as possible.

They absolutely should not be customizing headlines for fear of how it affects a small fringe of people who are going to think that way regardless of a Reuters headline

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