How Facebook's WhatsApp Destroyed A Village (buzzfeednews.com)

The proliferation of affordable smartphones, dwindling data prices, and apps and services that are designed to work swiftly on such patchy infrastructure have changed how people in developing markets marred with poor literacy level such as India communicate, do business, and get their education. But it has also come at a cost. In the recent months we have learned about Facebook's struggle to contain violence in Myanmar, BuzzFeed News has a chilling story on how rumors circulated through WhatsApp, which is also owned by Facebook, are causing real violence in India, the world's second largest internet market. From the report: WhatsApp, a Facebook-owned messaging service, is used by more than 200 million people in India, its largest market. It's become an inextricable part of the country's culture and social fabric, widely used by younger and older generations alike. It's one of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's crown jewels, an app he acquired for $19 billion in 2014 that began as a messaging platform but is now evolving into something more, with a new payments feature already being tested in India.

Lately, however, WhatsApp has been getting Indians killed. In June, rumors about child kidnappers shared on the service inspired a mob of hundreds to lynch a 29-year-old man and his friend who were passing through a village in Karbi Anglong, a district in the eastern part of the country. In July, two weeks after the Rainpada incident, hundreds of people hurled stones at an IT worker who was visiting the South Indian village of Murki, killing him. Since May, there have been at least 16 lynchings leading to 29 deaths in India where public officials say mobs were incited by misinformation on WhatsApp. As Facebook wrangles an ongoing crisis of public confidence over its role in spreading misinformation throughout the 2016 US presidential election, the company is grappling with a different kind of problem in places like Rainpada, where its products have abetted flesh-and-blood harm. In attempting to fulfill Facebook's current mission -- to "give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together" -- Zuckerberg and his team of Silicon Valley-based executives failed to foresee its malignant applications: misinformation, propaganda, rumor, hate.

Comments

Re:Facebook is not at fault for malfunctioning hum

[Kjella]

But damn you seem worried that Facebook is being accused of killing people. That's reductio ad absurdum - but engineers and makers of technology should be expected to have a social responsibility to try and limit the ways in which different societies may abuse their work.

No, most of the time this is insanity brought by people who want to "unvent" things. A knife doesn't know if you're stabbing someone. A camera doesn't know if you're producing kiddie porn. Instead of being simple tools technology is supposed to be your watcher, except the telescreens are smaller and you carry them in your pocket to ensure you're only doing "acceptable" things with them. If you accept that, you forego any right to complain about privacy, DRM, lack of digital ownership etc. you're basically renting your very existence subject to terms and conditions. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, go directly to China.

Re:Sigh.

[hey!]

Let's stipulate that Facebook is not responsible for this development. It doesn't necessarily follow that Facebook has no responsibility to respond to it.

My late father in law was in the Merchant Marine in WW2. One night one of his shipmates came through the mess with his blanket draped over his neck. "Get your life jackets on!" the shipmate said. "The captain's called abandon ship!"

The men in the mess laughed at the joke, and then suddenly my father-in-law realized: his shipmate was sleepwalking, and thought his blanket was a lifejacket. He ran out after the man and pulled him back as he was climbing over the rail to jump into the sea.

Now was it my father-in-law's fault that his sleepwalking shipmate was about to throw himself into the North Atlantic in the middle of the night? No. But did my father-in-law have a duty to save him once he realized what was going on? Most people would say "yes".

So it's clear that fault isn't the only way you can acquire a duty to act.

But if you live in a community where people will stone you to death without consequence, no amount - or absence - of technology can save you.

This doesn't follow at all. Nothing modifies human behavior more powerfully than being seen and noticed.

Think lynchings are alien to our culture? Then why does our language have a word for them? Lynchings in the US were a commonplace event; not just blacks were victims, it was commonly meted out to Irish too. The reason that public lynching declined in the US was the adoption of communication technologies and media which spread the news and images of lynching fast and far. The negative attention this brought ended the phenomenon of public lynchings with tacit official acceptance. The last time it happened with probable law enforcement complicity was back in 1965.