Families of Buffalo massacre victims sue Meta, Reddit, and Google over conspiracy theories::The lawsuit seeks changes to the changes companies’ safety standards, with the plaintiffs calling the platforms “defective and unreasonably dangerous.”
This seems unlikely to succeed. “He wouldn’t have killed those people if he hadn’t read that book with those weird ideas in it!” is unlikely to ever justify finding the publisher of that book liable, under plain First Amendment jurisprudence.
Whats next, suing video games companies for making video games?
Blame them for violent protests sparked by your shitty policy decisions
And yet, somehow, I feel like the lawyers who took this unwinnable case are going to come out okay.
One of life’s truisms: everyone can lose except the lawyers involved
Not sure that’s the best analogy since publishers do have an onus not to publish certain materials (example How would that work out for someone publishing something like the anarchists cookbook?)
Conversely, its not considered feasible for content providers (who don’t generate or police the content BEFORE it’s public) to police the work of content generators (the users). That’s why s.230 of the CDA (imo) does more than the first amendment
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+anarchists+cookbook
It’s openly sold by the world’s biggest bookstore. (And so are the similarly-named books that are actual cookbooks …)
Oh is it not banned anymore? Then my bad for using that as an example, but publishers do censor the works of their authors to try and avoid liability
Suing public spaces of discussion for what random-ass people talk about sounds pretty fucking stupid.
If I told a friend about my conspiracy theories while having lunch at a Burger King, would Burger King be liable for the dumb bullshit that came out of my mouth in addition for the dumb bullshit I put in it? 🤔
It would if Burger King recommended that conspiracy theory to its other customers, which is what social networks are designed to do.
God damnit this shit is a waste of time.
Isn’t this doomed to fail in light of the SC’s guidance in Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v Taamneh ??
Edit: "The platforms’ failure to remove such content, Justice Thomas wrote, was not enough to establish liability for aiding and abetting, which he said required plausible allegations that they ‘gave such knowing and substantial assistance to ISIS that they culpably participated in the Reina attack.’” (copied from a NYT article)
That was my first thought. And it’s not like it was a 5-4 ruling that’s teetering on the edge of being reversed
Good.
I can’t wait for one of your fediverse tankie friends to get called out. Anyone saying good is clearly ignorant of the law and how insane it would be to allow liability to be laid in such a way.
