India’s Lynching Epidemic and the Problem With Blaming Tech

In Indian state after Indian state, this spring and summer, the stories of communal violence bore an eerie similarity. There’d be a rumor, sent from phone to phone (perhaps accompanied by a video), about some strangers stealing children, or harvesting organs, or slaughtering cows. Then, someone unlucky enough to hand chocolate to some children or pass through a village would draw the attention of a crowd who’d heard the hearsay. The mobs attacked. Sometimes the outsiders lived. Often, they did not. Sometimes video of the attack would surface, bloody victims pleading for their life, and that would drive a round of journalistic coverage. And in the dozens of cases that drew media attention, there was a common thread: WhatsApp. “When a Text Can Trigger Lynching: WhatsApp Struggles With Fake Messages” read one headline in India. In the U.S., the title of a Washington Post story was “Forget Facebook and Twitter, Fake News Is Even Worse on WhatsApp — And It Can Be Deadly.” The BBC intoned: “How WhatsApp Helped Turn an Indian Village Into a Lynch Mob.” The Indian government issued a statement .