I'm pretty sure things like this happened in villages waaaay before WA came about. This is more old world than new word. WA is a very simple application that doesn't really, in itself, encourage anything specific.
How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village
71–80 of 158 posts
Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
See, this is exactly the problem I'm talking about. user11123 is being given a platform to spin the narrative and build negative sentiment – despite having exactly 10 karma – and I'm now wasting time replying to them.
This is exactly how disinformation campaigns and propaganda succeed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village
#73Earlier 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.
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Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village
#74This 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 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.
Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village
#75"“Messages about child abductors sent over WhatsApp can be misleading and we request you to not fall for them,” it said in Marathi. “Anyone caught indulging in violence or spreading these messages will be arrested and prosecuted.”" "... be warned: If you spread them, the police will arrest you!" That sounds like an awfully good way to make sure that people believe in all that stuff without saying it out loud. After a…
I suspect that the culture there has different norms regarding police censorship and control.
Australians see no problem with invasive police searches of cars and breathalyzers being administered without probable cause. Americans see no problem with a murder suspect's photo and name being broadcast on television, while the same act would horrify Dutch people.
Different cultures are different.
Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village
#76Why is this flagged? 1. negative about India 2. negative about Facebook 3. asks hard questioms sbout ethics & technology 4. all of the above
It's clickbaity as hell.
If anything, I wish it was more "negative" about India; instead of talking about why people take part in lynchings and why they are so common in the country, the blame goes to WhatsApp, which "has been getting Indians killed". It's as if the actual killers had no agency.
Same thing about the anti-vaccination groups in Brazil: as a Brazilian citizen my concern is that those groups exist at all and are affecting public health, not what app they happen to use.
Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village
#77Earlier 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…
A chat app is about as neutral as platforms get. What specifically should they have done differently?
Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village
#78Earlier 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…
What are the right tools?
Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village
#79Earlier 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.
You cannot compel a platform to carry a message against its will. This is true.
Restricting the messages a platform may carry according to the state's view of merit or truth, on the other hand, is exactly "regulating speech."
EDIT: To be clear, I am responding in the context of the upthread "Blocking WhatsApp would be a perfectly justifiable solution! Regulating it would be as well." Your argument seems less puzzling in the context of the very different assertion that Whatsapp itself should exercise editorial control. Apologies if this is what you meant.
Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village
#80"“Messages about child abductors sent over WhatsApp can be misleading and we request you to not fall for them,” it said in Marathi. “Anyone caught indulging in violence or spreading these messages will be arrested and prosecuted.”" "... be warned: If you spread them, the police will arrest you!" That sounds like an awfully good way to make sure that people believe in all that stuff without saying it out loud. After a…
I suspect that the culture there has different norms regarding police censorship and control. Australians see no problem with invasive police searches of cars and breathalyzers being administered without probable cause. Americans see no problem with a murder suspect's photo and name being broadcast on television, while the same act would horrify Dutch people. Different cultures are different.
It's not about acceptance of censorship. Even cultures that don't necessarily see it negatively (I'm from one myself) still exhibit this mode of thinking - i.e. yes, some things need to be censored, but when something that you believe in is being censored, that just proves that it's true (and important).