cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3320637
YouTube and Reddit are sued for allegedly enabling the racist mass shooting in Buffalo that left 10 dead::The complementary lawsuits claim that the massacre in 2022 was made possible by tech giants, a local gun shop, and the gunman’s parents.
I think the root of the problem is the Republican party. If you look at the language the shooter used in his manifesto, it’s very very similar. There are things social media platforms can do to mitigate extremism, but people like this will continue to feel emboldened by the GOP.
Everytown Law is about to get a lesson on how Section 230 works.
Pretty sure SCOTUS has a case they’re hearing currently that may very well change the scope of section 230 so I’d maybe reserve your quips until after that shakes out lol
The two big cases this year were already decided: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter,_Inc._v._Taamneh and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzalez_v._Google_LLC
Although both dodged the S230 claims, both made it clear that Twitter and Google, respectively, had no liability.
Is there another case I missed?
spoiler
sadfasfasdfsa
Ah, to be based on selective history and tradition.
Big tech says no.
This isn’t the first time they’ve forgotten how various laws work. And they keep losing. Kinda makes you wonder if it’s intentional or not.
This is so so stupid. We should also sue the ISPs then, they enabled the use of YouTube and Reddit. And the phone provider for enabling communications. This is such a dangerous slippery slope to put any blame on the platforms.
I think to blame/sue the company that is nearest to the user should work fine. (following is hyperbolical) If you don’t do it that way, then yes it would be slippery because the big bang would need to be sued. But that makes no sense.
So if an attack is planned via mail you think we should sue the postal service? The phone company if it’s done over the phone?
No, because these things should be private. Social media however needs some kind of moderation. edit: also go blame the user too, but that should be a given
I think just the poster should suffice, we should leave the platforms out of it. If anything, it helps to out the assholes who would post stuff that enables this.
Blocking a user and removing content from a platform should be relatively easy and fast which should prevent organized crimes. Sueing someone afterwords takes way more resources and time.
But a platform can remove content without getting sued. Why sue them too? Because if you don’t sue their asses they don’t care.
Of course moderation takes time and can’t be perfect and this should be considered when suing the platform owners. And yes this could help the assholes, but I think you can report such behavior to the fbi or someone.
Change mail (private) to moderated public notice board (not private). The owner of the public notice board should probably be sued for allowing the content to stay up.
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If my buddies and spend a month plotting a crimer in my cousin’s spare room, the cousin would be complicit since he knowingly allowed us to use his property for a criminal conspiracy. The USPS doesn’t know what i am sending in the mail since they are a common carrier.
I think the thing isn’t just providing access to the content, but using algorithms to promote how likely it is for deranged people to view more and more content that fuel their motives for hateful acts instead of trying to reduce how often that content is seen, all because they make more money if they watch more content, wether it is harmful or not.
What if it isn’t algorithms but upvotes? What if Lemmy is next?
Yeah, the difference is in whether or not the company is choosing what to put in front of a viewer’s eyes.
For the most part an ISP just shows people what they request. If someone gets bomb making directions from YouTube it would be insane to sue AT&T because AT&T delivered the appropriate packets when someone went to YouTube.
On the other end of the spectrum is something like Fox News. They hire every host, give them timeslots, have the opportunity to vet guests, accept advertising money to run against their content, and so on.
Section 512 of the DMCA treats “online service providers” like YouTube and Reddit as if they’re just ISPs, merely hosting content that is generated by users. OTOH, YouTube and Reddit use ML systems to decide what the users are shown. In the case of YouTube, the push to suggest content to users is pretty strong. You could argue they’re much closer to the Fox News side of things than to the ISP side these days. There’s no human making the decisions on what content should be shown, but does that matter?
Yep. I often fall asleep to long YouTube videos that are science or history related. The algorithm is the reason why I wake up at 3am to Joe Rogan. It’s like a terrible autocomplete.
The algorithm is tailored to you. This says more about you. I never get recommended Rogan.
Then what just give up hold Youtube account for their actions
I agree that his parents are culpable.
They should be suing the Conservative Party. That’s the enabler of gun violence.
hm yes, let’s look at who commits the most gun violence in the US, surely it is conservatives!
Yes?
lmao, it is almost entirely urban blacks
Lmao you should read up
Go take a political litmus test of every gang member in the US and see how many are conservatives.
Active shooters make a drop in the pale comparatively, they’re just the ones the media focuses on because it’s the narrative they prefer.
Ah yes, the famously politically active gang members.
They shoot each other in the name of societal wealth distribution, everyone knows that
Politically Active? Since when was that the metric? We are just talking about political alignment.
And why do you think they’re Dem?
They likely don’t care about politics
Crips and Bloods out there endorsing Biden.
🙄
As if most Cons actually fucking care either.
I’m pretty sure most cops lean right soooo
You really don’t see why the media would focus on a random mass killing instead of 2 scumbags shooting at each other over drugs? Weird.
2? More like thousands. If guns are the problem, then guns are the problem. We don’t need to focus on specific gun crime when those crimes are once again a drop in the bucket.
That’s why it’s weird.
“The conservative party enables gun violence” and “conservatives commit the most gun violence” are completely separate and independent statements. The person you’re replying to is saying the former, not the latter.
In other words, they aren’t saying that Republicans commit the majority of gun violence, but that the policies championed and implemented by Republicans are responsible for gun violence occurring.
And whether or not Republicans like it, they admit this all the time, although not the way you’d think. The GOP likes to say that mental health is the driver of gun violence and mass shootings, but simultaneously, the GOP votes against improved mental healthcare and even slashes funding for it.
Regarding mass shooters and politically motivated murder? Then yeah, it is, and by a wide margin at that.
I challenge you to be more ignorant. Please. I want to see if it’s possible.
Good. Civil court is where they’re most vulnerable, this is called tort law.
In criminal cases, the defendant is innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury of their peers. In a civil lawsuit, the defendant is only innocent until a judge, or jury, depending thinks they’re 51% likely to be guilty, what they call the preponderance of evidence.
In other words, “probably” is good enough when you sue someone. It is not good enough if the state is trying to throw you in prison. This makes it more efficient to process the 99% of civil court cases, which are usually just dumb shit, like which of these two arguing neighbors needs to pay for having a tree on their property line cut down or something. It also results in our civil system being a very effective weapon though, as a lot of wealthier and more powerful people know pretty well.
edit for italics
edit2: If anyone doubts me you can just google “tort” and read all about our American system on wikipedia, or any number of other places.
edit3: juries in civil too.
I don’t really know why you emphasized judge. Jury trials are very common in civil cases. This will be a pretrial dismissal or summary judgement without a jury, however. There’s nothing to discover or evidence to review that’s contested.
True, jury trials are common in civil. They’re just not the majority, and I’m trying to draw a simplified picture I suppose. It’ll edit it again.
You have klan members in Congress, supreme court, churches and every police department, but sure, YT and Reddit are the problem.
Reddit, youtube, and tiktok are quickly becoming the new, “video games cause violence” cry from reactionaries. Hell you see people here claiming tiktok is going to make all the kids have 2 second attention spans. It’s all just scapegoats for other systematic failures in culture, education, and social saftey nets, but those are hard to fix. Easier to just blame the platform and not make any real changes.
it’s not republicans that are suing over this…
Fair enough! I should’ve said, and have corrected it to, reactionaries.
It’s all just scapegoats for other systematic failures in culture, education, and social saftey nets, but those are hard to fix. Easier to just blame the platform and not make any real changes.
You mean like blaming guns?
Not at all like blaming guns. A gun is a tool used to cause death. The other things are all being claimed as vectors to cause someone to use a gun to cause death. If someone didn’t have easy access to a gun it would be much harder to go on a killing spree regardless of how radicalized they are.
Will be dismissed on section 230 grounds.
Their content promotion algorithms are not protected by section 230. Those algorithms are the real problem, pushing more and more radical content onto vulnerable minds. (The alt-right YouTube pipeline is pretty well documented. Reddit, I think, less so. But they still promote “similar content”)
Section 230 requires "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#:~:text=good faith removal or moderation of third-party material Selection of click-bait algorithms is a choice. At least, they could select out promotion of murder and maiming without a sled ride.
They should sue Facebook too. Facebook is rife with Nazis. And they’re fine with it.
Considering the Facebook algorithm will introduce you to neo-nazis, that would actually make sense.
Facebook says this guy’s face is fine: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100086229708504&mibextid=ZbWKwL
I feel like our problem isn’t that social media companies are not liable but that they are too big, like imagine this happening on mastodon. Generally I feel like mastodon would not allow this unless the instance was specificlly facist like the KF instance
I dont think the Fediverse is a good example of not allowing certain activities.
Reddit enables more than just racist, it’s a nasty cesspool the like of 4chan, riddled with bots, the CEO himself is a POS.
It’s a fucked up website but if you think it’s remotely as bad as 4chan then I’ve assumed you’ve never been to /pol/. Reddit doesn’t allow the n word.
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It’s literally rule 1…
Rule 1 Remember the human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups of people. Everyone has a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.
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Not sure what subs you’re on but I can’t remember the last time I saw that word outside of the r/4chan mod bot saying the comment was removed for it and they were quarantined.
Considering I got permabanned for saying if we wanted to find out if the brazen bull was a real thing we could test it on child molesters the rule is very much enforced. That’s way less bad than the nword.
Go to r/4chan or r/Greentext, it’s all over the comment sections there
… I mean you’re preaching to the choir.
Agreed. Spez’s support of The_Donald was the beginning of the end (although as he was a mod of jailbait before it was banned, it was clear that Trump wasn’t the genesis of Spez’s sickness), and now there’s nothing left of the communities that made it great. There’s hasn’t been anything rewarding about contributing there since about 2014.
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It’s weird that this is a link to the exact same 25 day old post on the same community.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
YouTube, Reddit and a body armor manufacturer were among the businesses that helped enable the gunman who killed 10 Black people in a racist attack at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket, according to a pair of lawsuits announced Wednesday.
The complementary lawsuits filed by Everytown Law in state court in Buffalo claim that the massacre at Tops supermarket in May 2022 was made possible by a host of companies and individuals, from tech giants to a local gun shop to the gunman’s parents.
The lawsuit claims Mean LLC manufactured an easily removable gun lock, offering a way to circumvent New York laws prohibiting assault weapons and large-capacity magazines.
YouTube, named with parent companies Alphabet Inc. and Google, is accused of contributing to the gunman’s radicalization and helping him acquire information to plan the attack.
“We aim to change the corporate and individual calculus so that every company and every parent recognizes they have a role to play in preventing future gun violence,” said Eric Tirschwell, executive director of Everytown Law.
Last month, victims’ relatives filed a lawsuit claiming tech and social media giants such as Facebook, Amazon and Google bear responsibility for radicalizing Gendron.
The original article contains 592 words, the summary contains 192 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The gun(s) are the most significant enablers of mass shootings.
Complete lack of accessible mental health counseling enters the room.
You know it can be both right?
No, it cannot. The comment literally said “most significant”. That means 1, not 2.
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It’s easier to get guns in many EU countries than many US states.
Blame everything but the shooter great
Nah, this is in addition to. No one is saying the shooter was faultless, so stop pretending anyone said that.
Youtube needs to be punished for their hypocrisy.
Average Joe gets a community guidelines strike for “promoting violence” because he said “Dead” instead of “Unalived”, but Penis Prager can advocate for beating your gay kids till they turn straight and YouTube just throws it into everyone’s playlists without so much as a “Boys will be boys”
