Comment by will_brown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by will_brown | Hacker News Reader

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The Federal Government does go after illegal arms dealers, so I’m not sure your point.

Otherwise arms dealers have a federal law that protects them in gun/ammo sales from the acts of their buyers.

That said notwithstanding federal protections arms dealers can be liable for the acts of their buyers if the seller knew or should have known the buyer was making the purchase to commit a crime.

Here FB knew or should have known they were being paid to publish an unlawful ad (at least factually FB knew the filters were applied, reviewed these ads and approved them for publication in violation of the law).

I’m not sure why you think preventing FB from knowingly publishing illegal ads is on par with anything else you are suggesting (ie “going after gun sellers”). Gun sales and ads are both legal...until they are not.

Why do you think it’s right to go after the ad creator only and allow FB to continue to profit on and facilitate the illegal acts themselves?

> Why do you think it’s right to go after the ad creator only

Never said or suggested any such thing. In fact I've explicitly said that assigning some responsibility to the publisher seems reasonable. What I find questionable is the singular targeting of one publisher but neither the advertisers nor other publishers. That's not how one fights for equality or justice, so there must be some other goal.

The Gov can and maybe even will go after the individual advertisers.

>That's not how one fights for equality or justice, so there must be some other goal.

It happens all the time, for example, low level drug dealers or even arms dealers are given immunity just for cooperation and just the chance to go after the suppliers. It’s easy to say well, there is some other goal, but generally the goal is to combat the illegal activity.

Another example, which I have been using for years is Uber. Many Uber drivers have been arrested and/or civilly fined for illegally operating rides for hire without a permit. Yet despite all the arrests no law enforcement ever went after the company but only the drivers. I think this is one of the biggest injustices of our time, you have a multi billion dollar tech company hiring “contractors” to knowing break the law (in those jurisdictions) and then only punishing the individuals who are basically being exploited (i say this because Uber knew the acitivity was illegal in those jurisdictions, but they kept hiring drivers and scheduling rides in violation of the law, whereas the drivers didn’t necessarily know they were being hired to provide illegal rides). In some cases Uber even paid bonuses to drivers to leave jurisdictions where operations were legal to give rides in jurisdictions where it was illegal.

Is that really equality and justice to you? If law enforcement went after uber instead of the driver is that really indiciative by itself of another goal rather than stopping the illegal activity?

> If law enforcement went after uber

If they only went after Uber, giving Lyft and traditional cab companies and the drivers for all of them a pass, then yeah, I'd suspect there was something besides fair enforcement of the law going on. That would go double if they were stretching the definition of the law to include Uber's actions when its drafters had no such intent, or if they were simultaneously going after Uber for doing and not doing the same thing (parallel to the flak Facebook gets both for censoring and not censoring content).

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