[tomp]

This reminds me of the “Foxconn suicides” story... sure the absolute numbers were high, but Foxconn has like a million employees, so the suicide rate was actually completely “normal”.

> 25 people have been killed since May

So 150 people per year, or 0.000015% of India’s population. Sure, it’s a problem, but I’m pretty sure there are bigger problems that are easier to solve (rape and acid attacks come to mind).

[viraptor]

I couldn't find more historic data points, but extrapolating from 25 since May to 150 per year is a bad approach. There's a difference between: it's been always happening, and this is the most recent summary -vs- April 0, May 1, June 4, July 20.

[tomp]

What would be a better approach, inabsence of other data points?

[viraptor]

Don't do analysis which assumes you can extrapolate.

[jonhendry18]

A farmer in India commits suicide about every 30 minutes.

But that's still a tiny fraction of India's population.

India's population is so big any problem short of a rampaging plague epidemic can be dismissed with that logic.

[oscardelben]

According to the article, it's 25 people having being killed since the beginning of the year because of misinformation spread through whatsapp. It seems like it should be a big deal for the company.

[PunchTornado]

there are always bigger problem to solve. your point? I really don't get how "bigger problem to solve" is ever a valid argument.

[tomp]

Effort/time is limited so you have to prioritise what problems to solve.

[jopsen]

Similarly, one could ask if this is something new? Or have WhatsApp merely replaced another media platform.

[fooker]

It has replaced SMS. These issues have existed for a while.

[inapis]

These issues have existed for a while. WhatsApp, unfortunately, accelerated the pace. Messaging a person or a group of persons earlier was expensive and required a lot of effort (selecting individual people to message and each message had a price) and there was no guarantee of message delivery or even timely delivery. WhatsApp made it free and almost instantaneous to inform a much larger set of people reliably.

[walshemj]

This is a lynching for flips sake this is a crime several orders of magnitude greater than a crime of passion. presumably you would have told Lady Day that singing strange fruit isn't important as well not that many negros got lynched that year.

Also it looks like a lot of these lynching's are sectarian which is a threat to the good order of the state.

[dnomad]

> So 150 people per year, or 0.000015% of India’s population.

This is an enormous and completely baseless leap. Why would you ever assume that the rate of killings is constant? What makes you think these killings aren't part of a rapidly growing phenomenon of social-media driven violence?

[fooker]

What is rapidly growing is the rate of these events which are reported.

[tomp]

Not everything is a trend/signal.