Between the UN fact-finding mission saying Facebook played a “determining role” in the genocide, the Bosworth memo, and the shit ton of access we now have thanks to the whistleblower, how is this not a strong case?
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Here is a bit more detail on this determined role they took to spread the speech from reuters.
"To this day, the company continues to rely heavily on users reporting hate speech in part because its systems struggle to interpret Burmese text.
Even now, Facebook doesn’t have a single employee in the country of some 50 million people. Instead, it monitors hate speech from abroad. This is mainly done through a secretive operation in Kuala Lumpur that’s outsourced to Accenture, the professional services firm, and codenamed “Project Honey Badger.”
According to people familiar with the matter, the project, which handles many Asian countries, hired its first two Burmese speakers, who were based in Manila, just three years ago. As of June, Honey Badger had about 60 people reviewing reports of hate speech and other content posted by Myanmar’s 18 million active Facebook users. Facebook itself in April had three full-time Burmese speakers at a separate monitoring operation at its international headquarters in Dublin, according to a former employee."
In fairness to Facebook you can hardly expect them to hire employees in Myanmar. It would be impossible to keep them safe.
I wasn't totally clear about the difference between total apathy, which I'm sure facebook had for a small country with a language not in system vs "determined effort".
It's going to get into some very thick first-amendment weeds before section 230 protections are even introduced. Where do we draw the culpability line? Should Facebook have been legally obligated to ban those posts? If so, then if next week a failed coup attempt occurs in Burma to try and overthrow the military power that took control, should Facebook be held accountable for aiding and abetting the coup? We rapidly converge on a scenario where Facebook is culpable for existing, and then we may as well start shutting off forums in general.
With broad fringes, we generally draw the line at "no, the media isn't constrained from propagating a message; the responsibility rests on the speaker and the listener" in the US.
Not to say the suit has no merit. Merely that it faces a stiff headwind and a long uphill battle against a very laissez-faire freedom-of-information-flow precedent.
In general I think I agree with you, but on forums this is subtly different.
In a general internet forum, it's up to you decide what you read. On FB, there's an algorithm that determines your feed, and therefore the profit of Facebook itself.
If FB were connecting people, making the world a better place, and making profit by doing that, I think I'd be fine with that.
But it looks like FB can trade the general good will of people, replace it with extremism and make a profit doing so. And if that's true, I think we need to seriously look at section 230.
There's a series of commons that we all share (e.g. water, air). I'm not quite sure if this fits in this category, but for democracy to work, people have to agree to not resort to violence to solve their problems. Trading the common good will for your fellow country men for profit, while watching the world burn, is I think not what we want as a society.
Every forum has an algorithm (including this one, which sorts by upvotes and hides dead content unless the user asks for it).
Hacker News in absolutely no way shape or form has an algorithmic system on the same level Facebook has, it is manifestly a bad analogy
It's not an analogy, it's just a literal truth. HN has an algorithm (of far less complexity than Facebook's) for determining what shows up at the top of the news page and the comments on a topic.
A possible question of interest, were this lawsuit to find Facebook guilty, is "If someone somehow gamed HN's algorithm (which is relatively simple, so would in practice be pretty easy to game) to encourage a genocide, should HN be liable?" How complicated the algorithm is likely does not enter into the reasoning for culpability.
So HN is largely not making money off their website, since they're aren't selling targeted advertising -- at least not to the extent FB makes.
If your targeted algorithm makes the company money off planning a genocide, and if you're aware of it and do nothing about it (because lawyers say blah blah section 230 blah blah), that's a real problem. If you're making money from people whining about a bad call in a football game, so what? But if your company actively promotes criminal content and profits from it, then section 230 probably isn't going to save you. Either it will change, or the courts will force you to.
Hacker News doesn't have an algorithm to decides what's the best posts and should appear in a person's feed. It has editors/moderators.
The contents of the main page aren't decided by editors and moderators. It's an algorithm... granted, a simple one, but an algorithm nonetheless. Weighted factor of upvotes and age.
It's even game-able, if a person has a large enough posse to dump upvotes on a topic after creating it.
So I think there's two big differences.
1. Most people use facebook to keep track of their friends and family rather than email these days. Part of it is that you can announce the new baby in the family and it goes to everyone. But the FB algorithm decides what you view. So the most engaging a post is, the more likely it will show up in your feed.
The problem is that not all posts go to everyone, and if you actually want to see what's happening with Uncle Ed's cancer treatment, you have to physically go to his facebook page. Why? See point #2:
2. There was a time before Twitter/FB where ads paid for the server the forum was on. Social media realized that "targeted engagement" could be profitable. So by tweaking their algorithms to keep people on the platform, they would make more in ad revenue as they can sell more ads.
Of course this led to stories where good friends had died a year ago, and the facebook algorithm "neglected" to prioritize it on feeds, because it wasn't as engaging as the Bills/Jets game the day before.
> Should Facebook have been legally obligated to ban those posts?
Did Facebook promoted that posts? That seems to be the problem. High hate seems to equal high engagement that equals more money.
If Facebook profited of promoting genocide posts, that is clearly morally wrong. It can easily be also illegal and a felony.
Facebook is not a chat but a curated feed of news. Back when it started it was not like that, but when the timeline became the curated feed then everything changed and responsibility is on the curators side.
Personally, I think Facebook's largest problem in this situation is that they were overly reliant on "AI" systems to flag hate speech, which is against their terms of service anyways.
The problem is that Myanmar up until recently (until after the genocide) wasn't even using Unicode, and Facebook only did the bare minimum to get Zawgyi-text processing up.
They also did not hire any Burmese language moderators until it was too late, in a country where Facebook more or less became synonymous with the internet. Meanwhile, Facebook had worked with local phone companies to preinstall the app on phones.
So again, I think this was growth at all costs, without thinking about the consequences, until they got enough egg on their face.
I would love to learn more about which precedents are relevant to this case.
Does the first amendment and section 230 mean anything in Burma?
The suit was filed in the state of California and would be judged under US law.
Ah, that makes sense.
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.
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.
These all add up to a story where Facebook is doing bad things having a negative impact on the world, but that's a very different question than whether they violated any legal obligations. The plaintiff's primary theory of harm seems to be that Facebook allowed people to publish "extreme and outrageous hate speech, misinformation, and conspiracy theories", and publishing things like that would be legally protected in the US even if Mark Zuckerberg himself were the one writing them.