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Comment by missedthecue | Hacker News Reader

Frivolous lawsuit. Hope it fails.

You're being unfairly downvoted because it's perceived as trendy to hate facebook and pretend they can magically police all human activity. But you're quite right. The courts will find this too and have done in the past multiple times. This is just dumb clickbait and people are biting.

In this case they should have demonstrated better security around their place. A person was singled out and PII was published. It was reported and they took down the information only 8 days after the person’s death.

They clearly need more moderators for what they do and the way they play with people’s attention.

These things always come down to people not being able to define "should".

Would it be a good thing if Facebook had more moderation? Probably.

Are they morally or legally liable because a bunch of third parties committed a crime off of the platform? No, not at all.

You might disagree, but then you have to explain why facebook in particular are liable. Why aren't the actual murderers? Or the people who posted the information? Why aren't the electricity suppliers who enabled people to get online? Why isn't the government and local police?

Would it be nice if facebook solved all social problems? Yes, it would be lovely. But it's not actually their job or problem and more than it is your job. Just because they're big and you're (understandably) angry doesn't make them guilty.

Exactly. People want a special carve-out for Facebook and don't want to apply the same logic to public places and text apps. The magical "algorithm" is supposedly at blame, simply because there is supposedly an "algorithm" somewhere inside Facebook that sinisterly pulls the strings, whatever string, in order to make money.

What about it is frivolous exactly?

A civil suit for $2 billion which alleges that Facebook's algorithm promoted popular posts with lots of engagement more than it promoted unpopular posts is frivolous and deserves to be tossed.

It resulted in death. That seems a key detail. Do you think that aspect matters?

It was raised with them, they didn’t act and someone died. They have no responsibility for spreading death threats?

If that content is ok, what content is not ok?

The article expressly states that violent content is not allowed and was actively policed. Facebook moderators are not fully omniscient and omnipresent. That is not grounds for a $2 billion lawsuit. That fact that people died is sad, but ultimately immaterial to the arguments here considered.

If they can't determine if a post is violent or not, then they shouldn't blindly promote it.

They don't promote it blindly. They promote it knowingly.

That's a good answer to this. They should be responsible for what the algorithm decides to inject into people's feeds, when they are acting as a publisher.

If they don't have enough resources to review the outputs from their algorithm, then to bad, just show posts from friends only.

There will always be false negatives. Is one false negative enough to drag them into court? So every website on earth will just have that one moment where they accidentally promote (or don't actively de-promote) something toxic, and they'll get to go to court over it. I wonder how much Twitter will have to charge now. $8/mo isn't going to cut it. More like $80,000/mo

> Abrham Amare, a researcher and son of chemistry professor Meareg Amare, said that his father was targeted by a series of threatening posts because he was ethnically Tigrayan. He reported the posts, some of them shared over 50,000 times, to Facebook because they contained his father's address and called for his death.

> Eight days after the elder Amare was murdered, Facebook finally removed the post, according to the researcher.

Doesn't sound like they "actively policed" the content sufficiently.

Who determines sufficiency (well, a jury here…)?

If an ethnic conflict occurs in a relatively obscure region are they going to spin up new moderators on the AWS spot market?

These things aren’t perfect or fast.

The discussion wasn't about perfection, it was about whether this was a "frivolous lawsuit", which it obviously is not. You probably knew this, metamann, brand new account which has only commented in this thread about how Facebook's inaction lead to death.

> Doesn't sound like they "actively policed" the content sufficiently

See that's the problem with omniscience, you kind of need it to police EVERYTHING. Something will always make it through.

If they can't guarantee the safety of the people using their software. Facebook shouldn't be allowed to operate.

The same is true for venues, sports, shops, workplaces, etc... why not software companies?

The analogy is pretty weak here.

People commit crimes inside businesses all the time, and under most circumstances the owner of a business is not liable for damages resulting from a third-party committing a crime on their property. People also use various communication tools to advocate and plan crimes, and the operators of those tools are almost never liable.

What's different here is that Facebook makes decisions about what content to show to people. It uses an algorithm to do so, and it is aware that the algorithm has a tendency to promote violent content. While I'm broadly for platform immunity, that seems like a good situation to add an exception.

I don't think it's been proven that "muh algorithm" did anything of the sort.

Well, the key here would be “raised with them.”

How that was handled. Had they seen human review and wrongly rejected? Was it thrown up the chain and a VP said “fuck then skinnies!”? Was it just lost in a message queue?

All in all, this reminds me a bit of the old joke “The mail man is my drug dealer, and he doesn’t even know it.”

Well, if I mail a letter to the Post Master telling him my neighbor buys fentanyl via the post and he doesn’t read it in time, I can’t blame him for not getting to it… barring dereliction.

So, no, blanket hating FB here is just smooth-brain outrage culture.

> If that content is ok, what content is not ok?

sharing the flight plan of an airplane, apparently.

the reality is, these people truly do understand how posts impact real world safety. they fully understand and are outraged if the posts are directed in anyway towards their group—they just don’t care, or maybe worse.

If they use an algorithm to promote posts to increase their bottom-line instead of some neutral and transparent way (such as reverse-chronological feed of what people explicitly followed) they effectively act as an editor and should lose whatever Section 230-equivalent protection they are currently using.

Facebook (and other "growth & engagement" platforms) currently want to have their cake and eat it too. They act as an editor, selectively promoting certain content that increases engagement and thus their bottom-line while not taking any of the liability. Newspapers can do this too (and to a certain extent, do) but are under strict regulation which limits the damage (yes, tabloids are a thing, but none of them would publish outright calls to violence and promote illegal activities, something very commonplace on Facebook because outrageous content generates more engagement).

Why should a company be free to manslaughter as they please? I feel like the directors should be brought to account for that region...imho

Is it more of less frivolous than the time Facebook helped organise a genocide?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

Facebook helped organize it in the same sense that Apple helped organize it when Burmese people use their devices to talk to each other.

I understand that HN has a massive hate boner for Facebook, but don't let it cloud your judgment.

No, Facebook’s role was considerably more active than that. The messages that were amplified, the complaints that were ignored and they allowed the organisation of a genocide.

The NYT article covers it quite well but there is no shortage of information on their abysmal performance in the atrocities.

> The messages that were amplified

And Apple participated in that. Also the internet providers.

> the complaints that were ignored

I am sure Apple gets a lot of complaints about Facebook

> and they allowed the organisation of a genocide

Still fits Apple

Please explain it to me as if I was a 5 year old. I do not understand the similarities between a communication platform and an ad-supported social network that uses software to maximize user engagement.

From my naive standpoint I feel like when you manipulate people’s attention you should be somewhat liable for what happens as a result of that.

> communication platform and an ad-supported social network

Every social network is a communication platform.

That’s too simplistic in my opinion. Social networks have publishing aspects and Facebook is responsible for what appears and gets amplified on their properties.

What happens in real life when a city gets plastered with posters containing calls for violence?

I think the more you give people reach the higher is your responsibility to moderate the content.

> That’s too simplistic in my opinion.

You got an adult explanation above. You asked for ELI5.

Thanks for the article. Corresponding discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18225364

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