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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

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.

gooddelta 8y ago
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.
- sometimesijust 8y ago
  > "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.
  - honestoHeminway 8y ago
    In the next village, the grown up child will be a dangerous outsider.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  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.
  - gooddelta 8y ago
    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.
    - ryandrake 8y ago
      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!"
  - sterlind 8y ago
    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?
    - user111233 8y ago
- p1necone 8y ago
  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)
  - toofy 8y ago
    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.
    - user111233 8y ago
      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.
- closeparen 8y ago
  "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?
  - p1necone 8y ago
    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."
    - user111233 8y ago
      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.
  - Tempest1981 8y ago
    The article mentions forwarded hoax videos: “each said they’d done so after watching shocking videos on WhatsApp warning of outsiders abducting children.”
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mwfunk 8y ago
  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.
  - projektir 8y ago
    Yes, I don't see how this is on WhatsApp in the slightest unless we're going to say communication apps shouldn't exist...
reitanqild 8y ago
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.
IBM 8y ago
>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.
- p1necone 8y ago
  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.
  - gooddelta 8y ago
    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.
    - closeparen 8y ago
      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.
gaius 8y ago
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”.
abalone 8y ago
> 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.
antoinevg 8y ago
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.
rishav_sharan 8y ago
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.
- rapnie 8y ago
  > 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.
  - beaconstudios 8y ago
    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.
- pluma 8y ago
  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"?
  - beaconstudios 8y ago
    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.
esalman 8y ago
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.

gooddelta 8y ago

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.

sometimesijust 8y ago
> "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.
- honestoHeminway 8y ago
  In the next village, the grown up child will be a dangerous outsider.
ryandrake 8y ago
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.
- gooddelta 8y ago
  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.
  - ryandrake 8y ago
    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!"
- sterlind 8y ago
  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?
  - user111233 8y ago
p1necone 8y ago
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)
- toofy 8y ago
  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.
  - user111233 8y ago
    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.
closeparen 8y ago
"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?
- p1necone 8y ago
  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."
  - user111233 8y ago
    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.
- Tempest1981 8y ago
  The article mentions forwarded hoax videos: “each said they’d done so after watching shocking videos on WhatsApp warning of outsiders abducting children.”
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mwfunk 8y ago
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.
- projektir 8y ago
  Yes, I don't see how this is on WhatsApp in the slightest unless we're going to say communication apps shouldn't exist...

reitanqild 8y ago

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.

IBM 8y ago

>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.

p1necone 8y ago
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.
- gooddelta 8y ago
  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.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    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.

gaius 8y ago

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”.

abalone 8y ago

> 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.

antoinevg 8y ago

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.

rishav_sharan 8y ago

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.

rapnie 8y ago
> 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.
- beaconstudios 8y ago
  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.
pluma 8y ago
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"?
- beaconstudios 8y ago
  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.

esalman 8y ago

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.