A killer app!

A couple of months ago, my father commented that I am the only one who is not on WhatsApp.  Which is true.  I have never had a WhatsApp account.  I have blogged a lot about it though ;)

A few years ago, Tunku Varadarajan, who used to write for the Wall Street Journal when it was a respectable publication before it became a Faux-News-wannabe trash wrote what I thought was a tongue-in-cheek commentary on why Indians love Facebook.

Social media was invented for Indians, says Sree Sreenivasan, a digital media professor at Columbia and co-founder of SAJA, the South Asian Journalists Association. "They take to it naturally and with great passion. It allows them to do two things they love: Tell everyone what they are doing; and stick their noses into other people's business."

As one can imagine, Varadarajan's commentary was not well received by Indians.

The spread of Facebook in India is nothing compared to how passionately people use WhatsApp there.  Messages bouncing off other's phones seemingly faster than the speed of light.  People don't even bother with regular cellphone or landline calling--they WhatsApp call each other.  "Social media was invented for Indians" indeed!

And sticking noses into other people's business has taken on dangerous--yes, literally dangerous--scales.  A couple of months ago, NPR even did a story on this!

In India, fake news can be deadly. About 20 people have been lynched by mobs, amid social media messages of kidnappers on the loose. Police are trying to teach first time smartphone users how to discern fact from fiction online.

This is a real hazard in India, where the beat-first-question-later approach is one that I have been scared about right from a young age.  As a kid, I had barely learnt to ride a bicycle, when I crashed into a kid on the street, a few hundred feet from home.  The kid's mother thrashed me--without asking even one question about what had happened!  A friend from Bombay used to joke (no haha for me though) about this beat-first-question-later MO--he said that in Hindi and then translated it for me!

With WhatsApp, made up news travels fast and wide.  It has gotten out of control.

As smartphone use spread in India, so did WhatsApp: It has over 200 million users in the country, according to a company spokesman. Soon, it became more than just a simple peer-to-peer communications tool. Indians now use it to disseminate political campaign platforms, distribute news and public announcements, and promote businesses, turning it into something resembling a broadcasting and publishing platform. According to WhatsApp, users in India forward more messages, photos, and videos than in any other country in the world—making it the perfect breeding ground for disinformation.

Last December, when my father showed me a video that somebody had sent him through WhatsApp, I told him it was fake, and warned him to be careful.  I am not sure if he understood how serious I was.

Life gets more and more challenging!