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How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

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Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#11

Post by bhadra »

gooddelta wrote: post #6
rosege wrote: post #5

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.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#12

Post by RyJones »

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.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#13

Post by cwyers »

gooddelta wrote: post #10
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 po…

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.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#14

Post by [deleted] »

gooddelta wrote: post #3

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, a…

[deleted]

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#15

Post by robjan »

gooddelta wrote: post #10
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 po…

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

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#16

Post by sometimesijust »

gooddelta wrote: post #4
jasonlfunk wrote: post #2

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 ignorin…

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.

> "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.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#17

Post by lxrbst »

gooddelta wrote: post #10
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 po…

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".

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#18

Post by ryandrake »

gooddelta wrote: post #4
jasonlfunk wrote: post #2

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 ignorin…

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.

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.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#19

Post by gooddelta »

robjan wrote: post #15
gooddelta wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 po…

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...

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#20

Post by schoen »

RyJones wrote: post #12

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 desir…

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?
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