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Facebook Sued for $1 Billion for Alleged Use of Medium for Terror (bloomberg.com)
A group of Israelis and American lawyers are suing Facebook for a sum of $1 billion in damages for allegedly facilitating deadly Palestinian militant attacks on their loved ones. The application accuses Facebook of helping Hamas militants plot attacks that killed four Americans and wounded one in Israel, the West Bank and Jerusalem. Bloomberg reports:"Facebook has knowingly provided material support and resources to Hamas in the form of Facebook's online social network platform and communication services,â making it liable for the violence against the five Americans, according to the lawsuit sent to Bloomberg by the office of the Israeli lawyer on the case, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner. Hamas is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S., European Union and Israel. The suit said the group used Facebook to share operational and tactical information with members and followers, posting notices of upcoming demonstrations, road closures, Israeli military actions and instructions to operatives to carry out the attacks.
Throw these clowns in jail for a while for filing frivolous lawsuits. Then put them in the town square (of NYC or something) with a vat of tar and a pile of feathers, let passers by apply liberal amounts of each.
These schmucks are thumbing their noses at the International Criminal Court and UN findings of war crimes, systematic abuses of Palestinians decried by the international community at large, a peace plan based admittedly in LIES, and are constantly ratcheting up attacks on civilian areas while complaining that people there are being radicalized into terror by their very actions. For Israelis to feel they have standing to sue FACEBOOK for FACILITATING TERRORISM?
It takes more than a little chutzpah. It's ridiculous.
Before Facebook, did they used to sue paper and pencil manufacturers for the same thing?
No, they don't have the fat loot FB has. If they're suing FB though, why stop there? Why not sue the ISPs for providing connections to Hamas. They couldn't use FB if they couldn't connect!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Paper and pencil manufacturers can't censor things that their customers write. Facebook can and has censored content already.
IMHO everyone on the internet should have to declare if they're a common carrier or if they accept responsibility for what they allow on a platform they control. One can't censor copyright infringement but then turn a blind eye to terrorism.
ISPs don't filter content. Once you start filtering content, like Facebook does, people start asking why you didn't filter other terrible content.
This is probably the reason Twitter doesn't ban the neo-nazis that are running wild on their system.
This lawsuit is actually brilliant, and it should succeed rather easily.
Here's why. Telecommunication services like Facebook, Google, and the Phone Company, are either classified as common carriers or as media providers. The difference between the two is that the former carries any content someone wishes to transmit, and the latter picks and chooses the content it will transmit.
The former is immune from lawsuits over the content that it carries because it takes no part in deciding what that content is. They are a neutral carrier with no interest in the content. The latter, however, does pick and choose the content that it carries, and because it does so, it is responsible for the outcome of that decision.
So, since Facebook knowingly censors and curates content, controls speech, and otherwise acts as a content provider and not a common carrier (and indeed I am not aware that Facebook is considered by the government to be one), they are responsible for the content they carry, even if they did not themselves put the actual content on the site.
I'm looking forward to the outcome, but I imagine these activist CEOs will have to find a way to shove their agendas down our throats another way.
Anything that even hints at criticizing Islam is immediately censored as "hate speech." No matter how innocuous, or true, the criticism may be.
But the same Facebook is just fine with allowing Hamas to use Facebook to plan terror attacks.
I don't know about the merits of the lawsuit, but Facebook's behavior seems suspicious.
I think you are losing sight of the fact this isn't a nation suing but individuals that were harmed. Regardless if they are Israeli or in this case Americans too, people shouldn't be murdered no matter what land they are on. Is it alright for ISIS to murder people because it is now their land? What about if an American is murdered in a Native American reservation? The point being is this is a civil matter brought by victims families against people they believe had a hand in the events that led to people they love to be murdered, no matter where they were located.