Yep.
>or cause to be made...
Key words here.
Sure, the government should be going after individual advertisers too, but selective prosecution or not, Facebook is clearly in violation.
>or cause to be made...
Key words here.
Sure, the government should be going after individual advertisers too, but selective prosecution or not, Facebook is clearly in violation.
Facebook is just the hardware store in this sense. They provide tools. And you make the billboard. They did not cause this to be made.
edit: They still may be responsible for publishing it, which is illegal. I would think its a much better argument to go after them for that then the 'cause' to be made' argument.
edit: ah. tunnel vision. yes the other parts of the statute would cover FB as partially culpable here. particularly the 'publish' part.
"To make, print, or publish, or cause to be made, printed, or published"
Nobody would consider forcing hammer manufactures to police their customers not to hurt people with said hammers either
If the ad selection tools are unfit for purpose -- say because it allows a user to target/untarget recipients in a blatantly illegal manner -- that's the company's fault.
Can we agree to this compromise?
Also likely the reason you'll start to see a shift over time in Facebook and Google's business models. They won't just allow any old thing on their servers any more.
Sort of like CBS or Fox can and do decide what kind of ads they would or they would not air.
I think Facebook/Google/Twitter/etc are going to find out that by being a publisher one has to actually act as a publisher all the time and not just when it is convenient.
Facebook caused the advertisements to not show for protected groups. The "tools" ran on their servers, not yours, so they are responsible for the outcome.
This comes up rather often but the "disruptor economy" style business that try and replace existing things that are burdened by regulations and other boring things with shiny new things with Vue, rounded corners, blinking lights and a lack of those regulations are, in fact, totally responsible for their failure to adhere to those regulations.
I feel like D&D and friends are ultimately partially to blame here, and their long (and wonderful, I'm not knocking table top RPGs) history of encouraging pedantic rules lawyering. The US legal code isn't like a tabletop RPG where if nothing specifically says your Thri-Kreen can't quadra-wield bastard swords with monkey grip then go ahead - when laws fail to specifically address situations then the courts are present to try and sanely interpret the intent of the original law and apply it to the new situation.
That's sort of like how murder is illegal, instead of it being illegal to hit someone on the head with a garbage can, hit someone on the head with a tire iron, hit someone on the head with a crow bar... "Murder" isn't an action you can take without a lot of abstract assumptions.
So perhaps Facebook is like a hardware store that sells the...
Burgler Bundle - a complete set of a ski-mask, crow bar, knife and lockpick set
(do note "Burgler Bundles" are not intended for burglery, theft, larceny
or other crimes, by purchasing the markers of the "Burgler Bundle"
are hereby absolved of responsibility for any law breaking committed)
They probably will.
But in this instance it’s much more appropriate the end FBs illegal business practices, rather than continuing to go after ad creators in perpetuity. Turn off the water and fix the leak instead of catching the drops, similar theory to local police flipping low level drug dealers to go after the suppliers.