I am neither attempting to silence your criticism nor questioning your patriotism. I am actually not even interested in your or anyone else's patriotism. I called that out specifically because I find a lot of fellow citizens making wishy-washy claims, trying to state the obvious, completely loose the context and history of India and consequently miss the forest for the trees. There are a lot of cases where I can get behind utopian and long-term solutions such as in education or health but I digress when people's lives are at stake and certain situations, such as these lynchings, require short-term hard interventions.
I am not asking WhatsApp to censor itself nor will I back a government which makes such demands but there are certain situations where immediate pressing needs requires drastic interventions and asking WhatsApp to assist in this is not unreasonable. I get where you are coming from and this is no doubt a band-aid but in certain situations you can't really help it. Temporary fixes are necessary to abate the violence and the Indian police has demonstrated the value of these fixes in riot hit areas by cutting off the internet access and the situation is brought rapidly under control. In an ideal world, none of this would be necessary but neither would there be poverty nor social strife.
> WhatsApp has done noting wrong here, I don't think the burden of the fix should be on them.
WhatsApp has done nothing wrong but at the very least it has exacerbated the problem. WhatsApp is a victim of its own success in India. If not WhatsApp, there would be someone else. But whoever is in such a unique and powerful position can and should shoulder some of this responsibility. You can't be oblivious to a society's needs and continue to reap all profits.
>Detecting fake news would be a burden.
Facebook already does this for the news feed so it is not something they have to set up from scratch. Plenty of organisations in India would assist in dealing with the data. Of course the end-to-end encryption would be an issue.
>Rate limiting as you suggested would be less of a burden, unless that is what gives them competitive advantage.
WhatsApp is pretty much a monopoly in India. All other apps are pretty much non-existent for a vast chunk of the population. Even if people move to other platforms, there would only be a short period of time before those platforms are forced to make the same decisions as WhatsApp.
WhatsApp could do so much more to help out but the only thing they did was to mark the "forwarded" messages. And even that was a half-hearted attempt. Small grey text on a white background which is very easy to miss. Pffftt...
And are they not aware about the "Forwarded as received" trope?