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by stickfigure 2844 days ago
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.
1 comments
gooddelta 2844 days ago
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 human beings" side of this issue.

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lxrbst 2844 days ago
> 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.

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user111233 2844 days ago
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.
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stickfigure 2844 days ago
Subtext: You primitives aren't mature enough to communicate in groups without supervision.

Don't you find that an offensively paternalistic thing to tell whole societies?

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solveit 2844 days ago
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.

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mijamo 2844 days ago
Well if you start using a megaphone to encourage killing people you will have troubles in a few minutes. With whatsapp... Not that much. Whatsapp is probably the first medium of communication that is harf to monitor in many places. It is much safer to encourage hatred and violence there because you don't need physical interaction, it scales a lot and authorities cannot intercept it.
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nradov 2844 days ago
What are the right tools?
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