Hindus believed spam on WhatsApp and Lynched 30 innocent people

The Indian authorities accused the WhatsApp messenger of spreading fake messages about the abduction of children, believing which "peaceful" residents lynched at least 30 people matching the description. Representatives of the messenger only shrugged their hands at such an accusation: whether to believe spam or not is a personal matter for everyone.

Source: Reuters

All WhatsApp users know that mailings with all kinds of spam periodically come there — from positive, a la win 15 apartments by clicking on the link, to negative - with some creepy stories. Hindus, not so sophisticated Internet users, took spam at face value, which led to very sad consequences.

It all started with the fact that many residents of India received anonymous messages containing information about some kidnappers traveling around the country. It was noted there that these are visitors and, among other things, they are not against robberies and rapes.

As a result, over the past year, Hindus lynched 30 people who were traveling in the regions. And just the other day, in early July, for the same reason, five more people who came from a neighboring city by bus were beaten to death. Local media reported that 40 people attacked them as soon as they left the transport.

On this occasion, the Ministry of Information Technology of India appealed to the management of WhatsApp, so that it immediately stopped the flow of dangerous messages. The administration of the messenger replied that it was impossible to block all such messages and the only thing they could do was to teach users to distinguish fakes from the truth.

It should be noted that the population of India is more than 1.3 billion people, and at the same time about 200 million are WhatsApp users. As for the abduction of children, this is actually a serious problem for the country — almost 42 thousand children were abducted in 2015 alone. The attackers knew what to put pressure on. But why?