Those Killer Apps

So, your name is mentioned on an app, like What'sApp in India, and you end up dead, killed by an angry bunch of people who use that app and believe you are guilty.  Truth of the accusations against you are not considered by the audience of people who mass together to take revenge.  This is mob justice, not unfamiliar to the USA, particularly in our history of rounding up the horse thieves and hanging them at the nearest tree.  We might find that those campers were on their way home from a roundup, and the mob that hung them would say how sorry they were to have made such a mistake.  It didn't happen often enough to stop them from lynching people on the spot, and India's use of this form of communication will not likely change the behavior either. 

We blindly accept what we read on the Internet when we should know better.  Our confidence in our national news media is not very high;  or confidence in elected officials is not very high;  our confidence in what we read on the Internet is not getting better (see Pew's Study on this ).  Yet, a BBC story about two men who are suspected of kidnapping children, summarizes the reasons for their death - a video edited by God knows who - shows two men riding up on group of children and kidnapping one.  The video was made in Pakistan as part of an awareness program, sadly needed to warn children and their parents that there are such people who do these kinds of things.  Seven people in two months have been killed by rumor mongering that led to their deaths. 

So think that you might be walking along, minding your own business, when a mob runs out from an ally and beats you to death for trying to kidnap a child.  That turns out to be wrong, but you can have that added to your tombstone - killed by mistake July 18th 2018.  The people of India have a lot of soul searching to do on this kind of behavior.