You’ve probably heard of rural India’s WhatsApp problem: hate speech, forwarded rumors, and sometimes incited lynch mobs. Both the press and the Indian government have blamed the platform for this, and Coda has tracked some of India’s attempts to legislate the problem away.

But others have suggested these weren’t really WhatsApp problems — they were problems associated with social and religious issues in India that manifested on WhatsApp. “Technology is what we make of it,” wrote Indian economist Mihir Sharma. “If we in India choose to use convenient messaging to form lynch mobs, that tells us more about India than it does about WhatsApp.”

A big Wired story this week seems to vindicate this approach — that WhatsApp was the facilitator, not the cause. India’s latest scapegoat is the Chinese video app TikTok, which has been hosting caste-based hate videos. “TikTok is fueling India's deadly hate speech epidemic,” reads the article headline. The actual body of the article is more equivocal, talking about centuries old and entrenched caste issues as “massive problems [TikTok] faces in the country,” thereby granting that TikTok did not exactly create India’s caste system.

Most technology scholars I’ve talked to fall pretty squarely on the entrenched-problem side of things: That is, they think hate and violence issues that manifest online ultimately reflect real-world issues. To be fair, it’s hard to find people who disagree with that statement.