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Comment by ryan93 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see how Facebook is liable for the actions of other adults.maybe evidence comes out that Facebook actively encouraged it. But seems unlikely.

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What if they just passively or inadvertently encouraged it? It’s entirely possible that the algorithms Facebook has used to prioritize content highlight inflammatory or violent content. Maybe in the process of maximizing attention they simultaneously optimized for showing violent or hateful content. YouTube has been shown to have done almost exactly that.

If that's how low the bar is set then most of the US media would be legally liable for the war in Iraq.

For better or worse, passively encouraging genocide isn't illegal under US law.

I'm not so sure you're right about that... Speech has limits and Facebook has corporate responsibility. They do monitor speech in the USA and still the impact is big (see January 6th) this is what happens with zero monitoring.

They can claim discrimination and many other such claims. It seems there's a lot of evidence to support criminal negligence. If inaction led to deaths a civil suit can get a big payout.

Facebook doesn't show content chronologically. Their algorithm decides what people see. They may not have purposefully pushed pro genocide content, but that doesn't mean they aren't liable if the court finds they were negligent in building the algorithm.

> negligent in building the algorithm

Otherwise it would be a precedent for creating algorithms that break the law.

BTW, you are 100% reasonable I do not understand the down votes.

I don’t doubt the algorithm prioritizes popular content. But how you go from that to saying the algorithm prioritizes genocidal content I don’t know.

It might not be intentional, but there's a pretty good chance that it does lead to extremism. I haven't read it, but perhaps the UN report has more information.

I believe it could be true because it doesn't seem that different from reports[1] a few years ago talking about how YouTube would push more and more extreme suggestions.

IIRC YouTube made changes pushing people towards more mainstream content and away from small producers in part to avoid extremism.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/4/3/18293293/youtube...

There is no law against doing things that tend to encourage extremism. For example, it's would be perfectly legal for a communist to state in general terms that we should execute all rich people as class enemies. Now obviously that's a horrible thing to say, but it isn't illegal.

Well, if it was a communist state there wouldn't be any rich people to execute, that's kinda the whole point.

There doesn't have to be a law against something for a jury to find you responsible for damages. This is a civil suit, right?

Facebook is a radicalization engine.

It is designed to reinforce existing beliefs and preferences in order to increase engagement.

In this case the beliefs were virulently racists and bigoted, and the engagement was usually done with a machete.

More generally, it's an anything-that-improves-the-bottom-line engine.

And it turns out that hate, fear, and tribalism are great for that.

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