WhatsApp? A direct messaging service? They have no recommendation engine, no algorithms, no nothing. It's all just infrastructure. How can you blame WhatsApp?

I mean, it's basically just "SMS, but then free". Blaming WhatsApp for the messages its users send is like blaming ISPs for piracy, right?

There was massive disinformation campaign through targeted massive whatsapp groups.

Everyone in Brasil is on whatsapp so that was a way to do it. I understand your point but some research would help.

It’s not so much as blaming ISPs for piracy but blaming hosting services for serving stuff like 8chan ir far right neonazi websites.

Yes the networks are different but we still need to consider the consequences and how to mitigate things. It’s either that or chaos.

So you think WhatsApp should have censored user messages?

I mean, that's quite a thing to say, very different from saying YouTube should make their recommendation algorithm more varied/broad.

I'm mostly just guessing what you're arguing for, but an American (i.e. foreign) megacorp blocking my message to my aunt because their shitty AI decides that it doesn't fit their head office's politics du jour, that sounds pretty dystopian to me. Is that what you're for? If not that, then what?

It's easy to blame people for things gone wrong when you can't tell what they should've done instead. If you can, please enlighten us.

(I agree with your points wrt Facebook and YouTube)

They could have prevented the deliberate misinformation campaign.

not true.

spread that the Left stole the tax payer is not disinformation.

Not even HN is a safe place anymore. This is a perfect example of the targeted users in Brazil's last elections: little care for facts, fond of over simplifications and dichotomies.

What about blaming the forest fires on NGOs, like he did earlier this week? That's the kind of thing being spread to his electoral base.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20762592

There's a ton of news articles about WhatsApp responsabilites:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/technology/whatsapp-brazi...

Google and you'll find a ton more.

There have been people interested in spread misinformation. But until WhatsApp, YouTube, and Facebook, which rely on and encourage oversharing, they didn't have the means to do it cheaply. They had do it the old-fashioned way by reaching people via publications or organizations. It used to take decades to build a misinformation campaign, now it takes weeks or months.

Ideally, at this point, working for Facebook should have become a badge of shame.

Hmmm... First, that's an excuse. The blame comes to the voters first.

Second, the main media this happened through was Fox News, which is a pure propaganda machine, that design lies and presents them as facts.

Third, I am fine with companies choosing to not intervene in political debate and stay as neutral as possible when it comes to manually applying filters on content. Being used to transmit propaganda is not the same as producing it

I don't think Fox News got Bolsonaro elected.

> elected due to fake news and extreme right radical content freely spread in Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube.

not true.

well, even writing software for domains like healthcare does not seem that meaningful any more with the ecological collapse rolling out around us. I'm probably fooling myself with the idea that I need to earn some more money to put it into conservation efforts...