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The Era of Whatsapp Propaganda Is Upon Us
- thisisit 9y agoThis is getting boring. People are writing left and right about each new app/social media site they can find. But the fact is: Rumor mongering has existed since the first human could talk. There were Hoax messages even during the email era. Surely, there are(were) politicians mining the email data to send messages to their prospective voters and surely there were people who were spreading hoaxes about 9/11 or the Kennedy assassination. The only thing which has changed is the ease of data collection and fine tuning of these targeted hoaxes. But, unless Whatsapp is providing some sort of targeted data for people to send hoax, this article is nonsensical. India for example, had issues with mass messaging and rumors. There was a ban on mass messaging in 2012, way before all of this became such a big issues, because precisely this issue: https://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/08/17/indian-bans-mass-sms-to-counter-panic/ https://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/08/17/indian-bans-m... https://www.medianama.com/2012/08/223-india-sms-ban/ https://www.medianama.com/2012/08/223-india-sms-ban/ Interestingly, found this old article from techcrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2012/08/23/indias-sms-hoax-panic-could-it-happen-in-the-u-s/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/08/23/indias-sms-hoax-panic-coul... It says: > Pulling something like this off isn’t easy — otherwise those quit Facebook day protests would have worked. The conditions have to be right.