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How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

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Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#51

Post by stordoff »

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…

How is blocking WhatsApp justifiable (or indeed useful -- this could be accomplished with more or less any communications app)?

I know it pails in comparison, but the London riots of a few years ago were (in part) organised over BlackBerry Messenger. I don't recall many on HN advocating for blocking BlackBerry Messenger. I feel this comment from the time applies as much here as it did there:

> Neither Blackberry, Twitter, nor Facebook fuelled the fire under London's riots, any more than the internet, radio waves, or electricity did. Violent, hateful people did that.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#52

Post by toofy »

p1necone wrote: post #21
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.

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)

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.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#53

Post by sooheon »

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…

Nothing about a communication app inherently incites violence. It's the ass-backwardsness of the community that is the cause of this behavior. The answer is better education, not misplaced blame on technology. Would you have banned gossip and verbal and written testimonies in the Salem witch hunts?

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#54

Post by antoinevg »

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 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.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#55

Post by sterlind »

user111233 wrote: post #26
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…

I haven't used whatsapp but from what I understand it's just an IM app. I'm not sure how an IM app can be responsible for this behavior. It simply lets users send messages to each other. There are no algorithms sorting what you see or promoting certain kinds of interactions. It seems that maybe some societies are far too trusting of baseless rumors and can't handle the fact that they are now able to share rumors incr…

Indeed, rural villages with low literacy rates aren't able to handle sharing rumors at the speed of light. This is precisely the discussion we're having!

Suddenly, high-speed internet is affordable even in places without reliable power. They can't spot fake news. They're unprepared for WhatsApp - do you blame them?

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#56

Post by closeparen »

gooddelta wrote: post #47
p1necone wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 “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.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#57

Post by gooddelta »

solveit wrote: post #45
gooddelta wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Okay, if you're going to be willfully obtuse about it, why don't you try to come up with a better solution? Because that's actually what I'm suggesting with literally all of my comments on this article.

And if you really don't understand the difference between optionally-anonymous, broadcast communication and a person standing in a group of people holding a megaphone, I'm sure you won't mind sharing your full name and location here?

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#58

Post by cwyers »

gooddelta wrote: post #47
p1necone wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What if there aren't any technical solutions that are likely to work, and no top-down regulatory solutions that are likely to be worth the cost? What if the only mitigation that works is "culture change?" Culture change is messy and slow and self-directed.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#59

Post by user111233 »

sterlind wrote: post #50
ryandrake wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unsophis…

If the government thinks the locals are unable to handle the internet then it should either educate them or restrict the usage.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#60

Post by mwfunk »

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.

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.
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