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Twitter, Facebook and Google Sued For Facilitating Paris Attacks (thenextweb.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Reynaldo Gonzalez is suing Twitter, Facebook and Google for facilitating the spread of "extremist propaganda" after alleging the three companies "knowingly permitted" ISIS to recruit, raise money and spread its message across each of the respective platforms. His daughter, Nohemi, was among the 130 killed when religious extremists attacked Paris last year. In the court documents, Gonzalez goes on to say that religious extremists would not have the infrastructure to get their message to the masses without the three companies and their social networks. While each company does have moderators that review content, The Next Web notes that it's a statistical impossibility to maintain that any company of such a size can review, or even find, all instances of offensive content. Google is also being faced with a lawsuit from the Space Data Corporation of Chandler, Arizona, which claims the tech giant stole the idea behind its Wi-Fi-emitting balloon network, Project Loon.
No it isn't impossible. The companies just don't want to INVEST their money to moderate or curate their content. You can be damned sure they do curate some of their content. These companies have hundreds of billions of dollars in CASH. They could do it if they wanted to, but they don't want to. They could hire 100,000 people to do it. They don't want to spend their money. But it isn't impossible, they just need to change the way they do business.
They'd throw an AI at it at best, and then have to hire a significantly smaller staff of people to look over complaints. Wouldn't be surprised if the AI twitter bots can be re-purposed for this.
Here is the thing though. Even if they could, would they want to? If they are shown to specifically filter certain content, wouldn't they make themselves more liable for the things that slip by? It'd be better to just ask users to report content that violates their terms of service, than to search it out themselves with fervor.
What this person wants, or will get if these companies getting stuck with responsibility will be the death of organized (as in a single place) free speech. It will fall to smaller groups and likely be a return to something like it was pre-MySpace, where people had their own sites catered to their own community. Much harder to track those down. Groups like these exist for things, such as drug trades or illegal porn, more specifically on the dark net.
For an example of what has been done in the past, think of the KKK or the Neo-Nazis. They aren't repressed by the governments like many would like, because if they are, then they'd be harder to track and likely act out a lot more. They calm their national terrorist groups by allowing them to speak publicly.
To one of the greatest quotes in history, "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
I would actually give up my freedom of speech if it meant the corporations had to as well. Because my speech isn't doing much to help and theirs is doing plenty to fuck things up.
While I tend to agree with the sentiment, the major difference is that Twitter, Facebook, and Google have taken it upon themselves to moderate the content on their platforms. The phone company doesn't terminate your conversation based on the content of your phone call. Once you start actively censoring the content on your site, you have to take some responsibility for the content you leave up on your site.
This is why phone companies aren't held responsible for illegal activities/transactions that occur using phones. The phone system just delivers data from point A to point B; so, you can't sue the phone company for prank/harassing phone calls from third parties. Social media sites have decided to remove content they deem objectionable and so will be hard pressed to claim no responsibility for the content they leave up.