How is blocking WhatsApp justifiable (or indeed useful -- this could be accomplished with more or less any communications app)?

I know it pails in comparison, but the London riots of a few years ago were (in part) organised over BlackBerry Messenger. I don't recall many on HN advocating for blocking BlackBerry Messenger. I feel this comment from the time applies as much here as it did there:

> Neither Blackberry, Twitter, nor Facebook fuelled the fire under London's riots, any more than the internet, radio waves, or electricity did. Violent, hateful people did that.

WhatsApp is a text chat app. You are advocating just banning digital communication. This is inane.

If you're actually serious I'd love to hear your justification, but I feel like you just haven't thought about this very hard.

Dude, nobody is arguing that we should ban digital communications at all. Take off the tinfoil hat, chicken little. What I'm suggesting is that if we are going to make PLATFORMS available (i.e. WhatsApp) that are capable of amplifying and making individual communications instantaneous, we mightttt need some more thought, collectively, about how to combat fucked up human nature. Like, just a pinch of consideration for the fact that the notion of free speech didn't evolve during a time in which any asshole could pull a thought out of their ass, hit send, anonymously, and reach a thousand people.

EDIT: Sorry, I realize that I was speaking condescendingly here. I'm just trying to get the point across that asking us to actually solve the hard problem of platforms before unleashing them on the world shouldn't be too big a burden to bear. Some (myself included) would argue that our entire society is destabilizing because of the lack of ingenuity in solving this problem. It gets frustrating.

The “lack of ingenuity” in regulating speech is a hard-fought, hard-won tenet of liberal democracy that a citizen ought to be willing to sacrifice his life to protect. Arguments about the need for paternalistic stewardship to protect the masses from their flawed human nature are bog-standard apologia from authoritarian regimes seeking to justify repression.

Did I say "regulating speech"? No. If we're going to try to have a cogent conversation, please stop putting words in my mouth.

Free speech != the right to a platform, which is synonymous with saying that, just because you have a voice doesn't mean your message has immediate merit, or that it is the truth, or that people have to give your voice equal weight to others, or that people have to listen to you.

You cannot compel a platform to carry a message against its will. This is true.

Restricting the messages a platform may carry according to the state's view of merit or truth, on the other hand, is exactly "regulating speech."

EDIT: To be clear, I am responding in the context of the upthread "Blocking WhatsApp would be a perfectly justifiable solution! Regulating it would be as well." Your argument seems less puzzling in the context of the very different assertion that Whatsapp itself should exercise editorial control. Apologies if this is what you meant.

The problem is that there's no solution to "deplatforming" people who incite lynch mobs that also doesn't give the power to "deplatform" peaceful protest against repressive regimes. You can't come up with a knife that only cuts what you want it to cut.

I'm pretty sure poster above is taking for granted that they (or other like-minded) would also wield the knife.

What if there aren't any technical solutions that are likely to work, and no top-down regulatory solutions that are likely to be worth the cost? What if the only mitigation that works is "culture change?" Culture change is messy and slow and self-directed.

Accountable... for letting people send text to each other?

Shall we block or regulate the printing press? Hold its inventors and users accountable for its negative externalities? After all, none of these countries/churches need to be fatalistic about the printed word or these heretics...

Printing creates a barrier to entry. You have to have enough conviction in your idea and determination to actually write the statement, lay it out, and print and distribute it. You don't just type "oh shit closeparen should be hanged lmao," hit send, and reach 100 people.

Please don't copy and paste what you posted elsewhere. That lowers the signal/noise ratio.

So we should just ban the internet because some village in india couldn't use it right?

This comment breaks the site guidelines, which ask: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

If you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.