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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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Slowly and surely the unix crept up on the Nintendo user ...
(Score: 2) by jb on Thursday November 15 2018, @04:54AM
Certainly, to date, no guns have ever caused massacres. Only crazed people using the guns for immoral ends.
However, with the continuing rise of autonomous weapons, it is only a matter of time before a "gun" (if you can still call them that) will cause a massacre.
The difference with facebook et al. is that they already use as much, if not more, AI than autonomous weapons and with far fewer safeguards.
So whilst I don't think facebook is capable of causing (cf. exacerbating) either a lynching or a massacre yet, chances are it will probably reach that milestone before "guns" do.