
India: Google engineer latest victim of mob lynchings fueled by WhatsApp rumors - shreyanshd
https://www.dw.com/en/india-google-engineer-latest-victim-of-mob-lynchings-fueled-by-whatsapp-rumors/a-44679902
======
Chickenosaurus
It's great WhatsApp took steps to prevent the spread of false information but
that isn't the root of the problem. The root of the problem is of a cultural
nature.

At present there is no law that criminalises mob killings. For that reason,
the perpetrators are often not prosecuted by the police. A law that makes
clear mob killings are unacceptable would go a long way in changing the
cultural stance towards such acts.

Thankfully, the Manav Suraksha Kanoon (law to protect humans) could close this
legal gap soon.

~~~
ryanlol
>At present there is no law that criminalises mob killings

Surely you're joking?

~~~
king_nothing
You’re talking about India: where slavery is alive and well, college girls are
locked in at night and rape/domestic violence goes virtually unpunished, with
police as “quality” as those in Afghanistan. VICE did a piece on this. Also,
sectarian violence there is normal.

~~~
sctb
Also in the category of generic flamewars unsuitable for Hacker News:
nationalistic ones. Can you stop these like we've asked you to stop the
others?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
sifar
I have been thinking about this a bit. [0] covers it in more detail at the
local level with a map of the places it has happened. This is something which
has been happening in India and is not limited to a particular state. There
was a recent article about how the cops discovered one of the videos
responsible for lynching to be fake and taken out of context of a NGOs
promotional video.

Makes me wonder the motives of persons involved - what do they gain by
inciting this violence. These are not your vote banks. But considering its
pan-India nature, this activity is somehow organized.

 _This is not a law and order problem_. In the sense that it is beyond that.
Those who say it do not understand the scale of mobs in India. You cannot
police this, especially in places where this is occurring. The police have
been helpless, even threatened.

 _The real problem is indeed the people of India. WhatsApp is just a medium_
\- though it makes it very convenient. I would even say this outcome of
whatsApp usage is inevitable in a country like India where you will find
abundant people ready to go berserk and people who want to exploit it for no
apparent reason.

Frequent reading about this really makes me loose faith in humanity. I don't
know how to change a billion people.

[0] [https://indianexpress.com/article/india/murderous-mob-
lynchi...](https://indianexpress.com/article/india/murderous-mob-lynchings-
accused-whatsapp-rumour-investigation-child-lifting-5249318/)

~~~
sifar
WhatsApp/Social Media have just begun to realize the nature of the beast they
have unleashed. Like the US fake news uproar. However adding technical fixes
to the way we communicate via Social Media is like applying band-aid &
treating the symptoms. We as individuals and society need to realize that the
cognitive and social costs of these communication mediums are increasingly
outweighing the benefits.

------
wheresvic1
This pretty much highlights how important education is and the effort that
needs to go toward educating the poor in India.

The coming wave of technology and tools is only going to exacerbate these
problems further.

One small thing that whatsapp could potentially do is to make it a little bit
harder to forward messages to everyone. force people to wait a couple of
seconds before adding another person.

~~~
shreyanshd
Indian here. Based on my observations, in India, the ‘whatsapp group’ feature
has become a medium for spreading fake news, political propaganda, religious
propaganda, pornography and other such activities that have a negative impact
at a massive scale. Whatsapp is the most prominent messaging service in India,
and though the ‘groups’ feature has many positive usecases, its mainly used
for influencing the (huge) illiterate population of the country. IMO, Whatsapp
should step in, and temporarily turn off the groups feature in India ASAP,
atleast until the deaths due to such fake news have stopped completely.

~~~
ryanlol
>has become a medium for spreading fake news, political propaganda, religious
propaganda, _pornography_ and other such activities that have a negative
impact at a massive scale

One of these is not like the others.

~~~
xkcdefgh
maybe he meant illegal pornography. I've witnessed whatsapp groups where
people share secret cam vids which were most likely taken without consent.

------
SuddsMcDuff
Surely the real problem here is that there are a great many people who are
both gullible and prone to violence.

~~~
jopsen
Missing the rule of law is often a good driver for vigilantism.

If people feel criminals aren't prosecuted, they are more likely to take
matters into their own hands.

------
paganel
A very similar thing happened in Bucharest a couple of weeks ago: a bunch of
people from a “poor” neighborhood attacked an ambulance-looking vehicle which
was being used by a 50-year old lady writer to promote books and reading among
the kids living in those poor neighborhoods. The mass hysteria reguarding said
lady was also spread through social media (FB and WhatsApp) and what’s even
more disconcerting is that even after the police cleared everything up and
explained the situation (thankfully the lady escaped with only some bruises)
there were still people commenting on said lady writer’s FB page accusing her
of being a child-kidnapper.

I’m afraid democracy and the idea of universal vote will start to be
influenced more and more by these people, no matter how much some other people
will try to “regulate” some communication channels.

------
joeyspn
The solutions provided seem quite poor. What whatsapp needs is a reporting
button for hoaxes and disturbing content…

~~~
mcny
And do what, exactly? What do you do once a user reports me as relaying fake
news? Ban me?

I strongly disagree. I am responsible for my actions. If I kill someone, I
can’t say “well, I thought this man ate beef”.

This is a law and order problem and not something we can fix from outside
India.

~~~
inapis
>This is a law and order problem and not something we can fix from outside
India.

These lynchings are not solely a law and order problems. Indian law
enforcement definitely has issues with maintaining peace and harmony but
WhatsApp has considerably added to the problem. A lot of these lynchings have
taken place within minutes. Before WhatsApp, it usually took a good amount of
time to collect a group and target someone but these mobs assemble with 10-15
minutes, do the deed and disperse mere minutes before the police arrives.

India needs legal and administrative reforms to deal with these issues but
WhatsApp can definitely put the brakes on such small mobs by merely rate
limiting the group texts. At the very least, it will give the police some more
time to respond.

~~~
srean
No, we should actually thank WhatsApp for exposing an old problem that all
have preferred to ignore or deny.

WhatsApp isn't the problem, we Indians are and that needs fixing, not
WhatsApp.

~~~
inapis
I get that it's trendy to shit on India especially by Indians itself but I
absolutely can't wrap my head around your argument.

India has its problems but asking a company to do something to remedy the
problem a little is too much? Lynchings happened before and they will probably
continue to happen but now they are happening much more frequently and the
common messaging medium is WhatsApp but somehow your argument is that the
culture and government should get its shit together? In other news, water is
wet.

It hasn't gotten its shit together for the past 70 years but please don't save
the lives of a couple dozen or hundred people because instantaneous group
chats are super precious. Let's not build a bicycle because we are busy
getting to the moon! Let's pursue the utopia and not pluck the low hanging
fruit!

~~~
srean
> I get that it's trendy to shit on India especially by Indians itself

Patriotism is much more than vapid flag waving and silencing criticism. I know
your heart is in a good place but I ask a little more good faith from you.

A close analogue asking WhatsApp to self censor is that of the Govt asking
women to cover up more to avoid sexual assault. Going by your comment history
I am sure that's not a solution you would like.

Its the years and years of band-aid that has gotten us here. Temporary fixes
will continue to perpetuate the problem just as it has in the past. Things
will get a little better and then we will forget about fixing the problem.

Regarding trigger happy lynch mobs -- The more we yield to problem children
throwing tantrums worse they become.

WhatsApp has done noting wrong here, I don't think the burden of the fix
should be on them. Detecting fake news would be a burden. Rate limiting as you
suggested would be less of a burden, unless that is what gives them
competitive advantage

~~~
inapis
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?

~~~
mcny
> 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...

See now that we see concrete demands now we can say whether we can agree. I
can absolutely get behind UI hints to help navigate users. I am not an expert
on this topic. I can see how things I think of being logical or even "obvious"
are anything but. I've been wrong more times

> 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.

Sorry, this is a hard no for me. BART did it. You don't want to go down this
road.

> Of course the end-to-end encryption would be an issue.

You don't want to go down this road either. Once again, this "solves" the
wrong problem. Be very wary of anyone who claims that weakening encryption is
essential to security, short-term or long-term.

------
thisisit
I got curious about the role of Whatsapp in this whole incident and googled
the actual incident:

[https://in.news.yahoo.com/google-engineer-beaten-death-
over-...](https://in.news.yahoo.com/google-engineer-beaten-death-
over-081518270.html)

From this story it looks like Whatsapp was only used as a communication medium
and not really the rumor mongering one. While I can understand some of the
examples given the linked dw.com article, I don't see what could Whatsapp do
in such cases? Should they block every offensive message?

So, for me this story sounds more like a low quality effort on part of the
media. Once upon a time there used to be similar stories about how SMSes were
being used for rumor mongering and spreading propaganda. And the major issue
has always been ignored - education.

~~~
RichardCA
This seems to be a decent accounting.

[http://www.freepressjournal.in/india/karnataka-google-
techie...](http://www.freepressjournal.in/india/karnataka-google-techie-
beaten-to-death-by-mob-on-child-lifting-suspicion/1316634)

------
calvinbhai
I'm sure Whatsapp has access to what encrypted message was sent by who, to
whom.

Simple would be to crowdsource reporting a post as "incendiary or fake" in a
group and it wont be visible to the rest of the users in the group. or hide
the message and show only after informing the reader that the message may be
fake, as reported by others in the group.

Twitter does a better job than facebook in this matter. And I thought FB was
way ahead with all the buzzwords like AI, ML, Neural Networks. If FB cannot
add this simple feature to Whatsapp, or something similar to this, not sure
it'll manage to help the lynching situation in India and world over.

------
anuraj
Ever since Narendra Modi came to power - India has become Lynchistan. The
Hindu supremacist leader and his organisation RSS that stands for ‘Cultural
Nationalism’ is imposing ‘Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan’ - a monoculture which
advocates ‘One Nation, One Language, One Religion’ for a country as diverse as
India. The hate that is unleashed is consuming democracy slowly but surely.
Future is indeed bleak for India.

Many Hindutva Organisations affiliated to RSS raise large amount of money from
US tech sector each year. I request everybody to put pressure on their
companies and colleagues not to donate money to racist and supremacist
organisations.

~~~
calvinbhai
This happened in the state of Karnataka, ruled by Congress, which is the
opposition in the center.

So whoever is blaming Modi for this crime, has no idea how the Indian
political system is structured, nor do they know how the Law and Order is the
responsibility of the state, or despite knowing all that they are either
feigning ignorance or spreading false propaganda.

Such lynchings have happened in India across states ruled by different
political parties.

If you really want to find a solution to this problem, tone down your politics
based hatred (at least on HN), and hold the respective state govts responsible
for such law and order issues.

~~~
anuraj
Cow lynchings, political lynchings, WhatsApp lynchings - many have direct
connection with Hindutva organisations. Recently we had an RSS minister openly
felicitating convicts of a cow lynching. That is the state of democracy in
India. State governments are virtually powerless under Modi’s Raj.

Here is an up to date chronology of lynchings under Modi
[https://www.thequint.com/quintlab/lynching-in-
india/](https://www.thequint.com/quintlab/lynching-in-india/)

Let us stand firm against hatred in the name of religion and race. Stand for
democracy - stand against authoritarianism.

~~~
calvinbhai
Why not have the count since 1947 to know if the "number of REPORTED
LYNCHINGS" are going up or down?

either way, this thread is not going anywhere. I'm out of this conversation,
since IMO HN is not the right place.

------
fleetingmoments
Why can't these sites implement a 'are you sure?' check before letting users
repost fake news? Do a lookup on Snopes or similar and provide that along with
information that informs the user of legal consequences of participating in
the sharing of false information if harm results from it.

------
sorokod
Sounds like the US practise of swatting transplanted to India

------
leke
Perhaps WhatsApp should do some PSAs, via the app itself, to places that seem
to be affected by this problem. They could be colour prioritised for
seriousness.

------
known
Casteism is worse than Racism;

Casteism = Racism + Slavery

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2325502/Map-shows-
wo...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2325502/Map-shows-worlds-
racist-countries-answers-surprise-you.html)

------
gaius
_WhatsApp needs to recognize India offers a huge market for them. They are
making good money out of India operations, " Information Technology Minister
Ravi Shankar Prasad said earlier this month. "Therefore they must focus on the
security related aspects of people of India."_

What is WhatsApp’s monetisation strategy in India? Is it susceptible to
regulation or is the government powerless in these situations?

------
king_nothing
There is an uncomfortable fact: many people only notice harm when there’s a
victim similar to them involved, but are typically oblivious or unconcerned
with the troubles not in their purview: impetus for mass-migration to Europe,
genocides (ie Hutus & Tutsis), East Timor, PNG, nationless people (ie
Rohingya, Kurds, Uyghurs, Palestinians, Catalans), terrorism in Africa and
neglect/poisoning of poor people in rural areas.

------
throwaway_009
Just wanted to present an observation that Deutsche Welle (DW) has an
extremely biased opinion of India and presents only the bad and
sensationalized articles about things in India. As an Indian living in
Germany, I have seen firsthand how misrepresented India is in foreign
publications.

Although, I don't doubt the article, I would suggest you take the article with
a pinch of salt. Yes, there are problems in some parts in India, but the
foreign media portray it like people are running around killing and raping
people, which is definitely not the case.

~~~
pgeorgi
"Like yesterday nothing extraordinary happened in 99% of India today" isn't
newsworthy though.

But maybe DW should emphasize the local aspect of these reports, like the
foreign office does: [https://www.auswaertiges-
amt.de/de/aussenpolitik/laender/ind...](https://www.auswaertiges-
amt.de/de/aussenpolitik/laender/indien-node/indiensicherheit/205998) Germans
aren't used to a single country being that vast and diverse.

------
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).

~~~
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.

