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How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

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Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#41

Post by p1necone »

closeparen wrote: post #33
gooddelta wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"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?

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."

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#42

Post by p1necone »

IBM wrote: post #24
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…

>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 t…

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.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#43

Post by closeparen »

IBM wrote: post #24
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…

>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 t…

Accountable... for letting people send text to each other?

Shall we block or regulate the printing press? Hold its inventors and users accountable for its negative externalities? After all, none of these countries/churches need to be fatalistic about the printed word or these heretics...

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#44

Post by abalone »

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…

> 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.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#45

Post by solveit »

gooddelta wrote: post #27
stickfigure wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The logical conclusion of this perspective is that human beings should not be allowed to freely communicate in groups. I'd rather not live in your world. Technology can't fix broken human beings. There is a moral failure here, but it isn't Facebook's. Blaming WhatsApp at best makes the real problem harder to fix, and at worst makes excuses for the actors in this horrorshow.

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 h…

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.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#46

Post by gooddelta »

closeparen wrote: post #43
IBM wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 t…

Accountable... for letting people send text to each other? Shall we block or regulate the printing press? Hold its inventors and users accountable for its negative externalities? After all, none of these countries/churches need to be fatalistic about the printed word or these heretics...

Printing creates a barrier to entry. You have to have enough conviction in your idea and determination to actually write the statement, lay it out, and print and distribute it. You don't just type "oh shit closeparen should be hanged lmao," hit send, and reach 100 people.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#47

Post by gooddelta »

p1necone wrote: post #42
IBM wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 t…

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.

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.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#49

Post by iamshs »

eccbits wrote: post #35

Why is this flagged? 1. negative about India 2. negative about Facebook 3. asks hard questioms sbout ethics & technology 4. all of the above

Negative about India. I have been receiving quite a bit of attention after posting India specific comments. And look how quickly it is dropping out from front page. Concerted effort.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#50

Post by sterlind »

ryandrake wrote: post #18
gooddelta wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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?

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