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Two innocent men have been burned alive by a massive lynch mob after WhatsApp rumours branded them child abductors.
A large crowd gathered outside the police station after rumours spread about the two men.
A mob dragged two men out of a police station, savagely beat them and then set them on fire, killing them, after a false rumour was spread on WhatsApp about the pair being child kidnappers.
The mother of one of the men made a desperate plea for the crowd to stop as she watched the lynching unfold on a Facebook livestream.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-46145986
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Burned to Death Because of a Rumour on WhatsApp
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(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Wednesday November 14 2018, @06:07PM (2 children)
I'm not sure where you got that 40% figure, but 2 common reasons white people would get lynched during that period in the US:
1. They were Jewish or sometimes Catholic.
2. They were perceived as not white-supremacist enough.
It's also worth mentioning that the white people who were lynched were usually lynched by other white people. If a group of black people even came close to trying anything, the then-all-white law enforcement + the KKK + other random armed white people would put a stop to it and probably lynch a few black folks to convince them not to do that again, while by contrast it was not uncommon for cops to participate in the lynchings of black folks, Jews, Catholics, and non-white-supremacists.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday November 15 2018, @12:36AM (1 child)
Just to be clear, since there seems to be a lot of doubt in some comments here -- yes, white people were lynched as well as black people, and not an insignificant number. From the NAACP [naacp.org]:
As noted, in many cases whites were lynched for aiding blacks, though there were certainly incidents of mobs that lynched whites for other crimes.
All of these numbers are estimates. The NAACP's numbers appear to be based on a report from Tuskegee University. However, I'm sure it's not the whole story, since obviously people of other races (Asians, Native Americans, Hispanics) were lynched too.
Furthermore, as another important point -- lynchings were not an exclusively Southern phenomenon. Hundreds of lynchings [uillinois.edu] occurred in Northern and Western states too.
None of this takes away that the primary targets of lynchings in the U.S. were African Americans (and very frequently motivated by racism). But it's pointless to deny that mob violence often targets randomly and is frequently irrational (which means it can target all sorts of people for no good reason).
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 15 2018, @03:47AM
Furthermore, people we consider "white" now were not white until very recently. Poles, germans, irish, italians - not white. They weren't black, but they sure weren't white either. Especially if they weren't catholic. And before some dumbshit reactionary racist like buzzard or runaway comes along screaming that white is white, fuck off and learn some history. The second coming of the KKK, the one that was most widespread, controlling entire state governments, was formed specifically to keep out non-white europeans that had come in immigration waves from 1870-1920 or so.