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How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

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Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#61

Post by gooddelta »

closeparen wrote: post #56
gooddelta wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did I say "regulating speech"? No. If we're going to try to have a cogent conversation, please stop putting words in my mouth.

Free speech != the right to a platform, which is synonymous with saying that, just because you have a voice doesn't mean your message has immediate merit, or that it is the truth, or that people have to give your voice equal weight to others, or that people have to listen to you.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#62

Post by user111233 »

toofy wrote: post #52
p1necone wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 happenin…

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.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#63

Post by user111233 »

p1necone wrote: post #41
closeparen wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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."

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.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#64

Post by mwfunk »

sterlind wrote: post #55
user111233 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I blame them for murdering strangers, yes. Of course. It makes no difference how they were tricked into doing so, that’s practically irrelevant.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#65

Post by user111233 »

gooddelta wrote: post #46
closeparen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So we should just ban the internet because some village in india couldn't use it right?

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#66

Post by cwyers »

gooddelta wrote: post #61
closeparen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did I say "regulating speech"? No. If we're going to try to have a cogent conversation, please stop putting words in my mouth. Free speech != the right to a platform, which is synonymous with saying that, just because you have a voice doesn't mean your message has immediate merit, or that it is the truth, or that people have to give your voice equal weight to others, or that people have to listen to you.

The problem is that there's no solution to "deplatforming" people who incite lynch mobs that also doesn't give the power to "deplatform" peaceful protest against repressive regimes. You can't come up with a knife that only cuts what you want it to cut.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#67

Post by projektir »

mwfunk wrote: post #60
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.

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.

Yes, I don't see how this is on WhatsApp in the slightest unless we're going to say communication apps shouldn't exist...

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#68

Post by user111233 »

lxrbst wrote: post #32
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…

> we're exacerbating the "broken human beings" side of this issue. There is no other side of this issue. This could and probably have happened with sms. This is 100% the mob's fault.

SMS costs a lot in 3rd world countries. We are probably seeing these issues now because this is the first time these people have had access to cheap and easy communication. The rest of the world was eased in to it with email and the web but these countries are being dropped in to the deep end.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#69

Post by projektir »

sterlind wrote: post #55
user111233 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm not buying it, these people lynched somebody, this isn't about a lack of literacy. It's about being used to using violence as a way to solve problems.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#70

Post by tepidandroid »

gooddelta wrote: post #57
solveit wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

Actually all i’ve seen you do in this thread is moralize about the use of technology. You haven’t really offered any solution to the problem at all, aside from suggesting that technologists ‘think about it more’ before creating such platforms.
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