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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.
Before Facebook, did they used to sue paper and pencil manufacturers for the same thing?
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.
Should come around, might as well sue FB over all those violent settlers groups inciting violence and planning attacks. but that would be antisemetic some how.
Phone companies are common carriers. Common carriers are shielded from liability if someone uses their network to plan or commit nefarious activities. They even lobbied to be common carriers so they specifically aren't held liable for the content of the conversations that traverse the telephone network.
Internet companies are NOT common carriers. They have lobbied to NOT be common carriers specifically so they have the power to control and and disallow speech they personally disagree with. By NOT censoring terrorist groups, they have shown that they are giving de facto support to those groups and that they effectively agree with the speech of terrorists, thereby they can absolutely be held liable for the content of the conversations and speech that traverses their networks.
I'm not so sure it is frivolous. FB opened this can of worms itself by engaging in censorship and control of its pages. Now, if they can prove in court that it is just a false perception of censorship and control, they can get away with this. But, if they are filtering their content manually at all, they become legally responsible for all of it.
No. The fact that you are ready to defend these Ambulance-Chasers-On-Steroids is ridiculous. This goes beyond ambulance chasing. These attorneys should be ashamed of themselves.
They should go after the perpetrators of the violence. But wait, they have no money. So let's take $RANDOM_AMERICAN_BUSINESS, because not only do they have money, American juries are made up of average Americans. With an average IQ of the Siberian mean temperature.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
This is a good point. I would find in favor of Facebook where I on a jury but the more Facebook filters content they don't agree with, the more they might open themselves up for things like this. I would think you'd have to show that they were aware of the communications taking place and chose not to interfere though... or that being aware of it would have been such a trivial thing as to show recklessness on their part.
Regardless of this specific lawsuite, we should ask ourselves, are Facebook and others doing enough to stop terrorists for leveraging their platform?
Consider the great effort by Youtube and others to stop copyright infringements. Both internally and by use of DMCA notice and take-down.
The effort in stopping not only incitement to racial violence but also operational planning of such acts seems meager.
I think lawmakers are almost inherently behind the times on this, and we seem to not have an anti-terror lobby anywhere as strong as the stronger-IP lobby. It would be nice to see Facebook get their act together and do more, setting standards for others to follow and if necessary become law.
Has no one ever heard the term "common carrier"? You don't get to pick and choose what speech you allow on your little safe space AND be free from liability if someone commits crimes or otherwise does "bad things" on your services. This is why telephone companies have been classified as common carriers for nearly a century. If you allow all speech, unfettered, then you're free from liability for what anyone does on your service.
I'm honestly shocked it took this long for someone to call these hypocritical companies out on their bullshit, and I support it 100%. They want to be able to control speech, but only speech "they" dislike. That's fine, but when you open up that can of worms, you'd better be ready to make sure you're keeping the walled garden free of ALL vermin (and apply your policies equally, which we all know these scumbags don't) or someone's eventually going to call you out on it.
I'm not so sure it is frivolous. FB opened this can of worms itself by engaging in censorship and control of its pages. Now, if they can prove in court that it is just a false perception of censorship and control, they can get away with this. But, if they are filtering their content manually at all, they become legally responsible for all of it.
It is worth noting that Facebook's reporting system appears to be designed more for hate speech and nudity than for terrorism, and they made design decisions in the reporting system. For example, there are thousands of shares of terrorist hoaxes every day that they don't appear to even try to stop. E.g. the meme about all the stolen UPS uniforms (http://www.snopes.com/rumors/upsuniforms.asp)
Real lawyers write in C++
The israelis consider everyone who isn't ardently pro-israel/anti-palestinian as terrorists. Most people are getting pretty fed up with this shit, especially the crap going on in the west bank which violates international law and may be a crime against humanity and/or genocide.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.
They're breaking the rules too. See creating, approving, and encouraging building of settlements in occupied territory. A lot of Israelis are opoosed to this but they're not able to break up the majority coalition (ie, the ultra orthodox will happily side with the hardliners as long as they continue to be exempt from military service). Rationally it is obvious that building the settlements only disrupts the possibility of peace but politics and rationality don't cooperate with each other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_settlement_timeline
http://passblue.com/2014/07/11/israeli-settlements-a-timeline-from-1967-to-now/
How about someone take your country illegally, then tell you to stuff it, and get the world to agree because it's anti-semitism otherwise. Then proceed to demolish your villages and put in apartment blocks for illegal settlers? The picture below shows hundreds of thousands of settlers relocating to contested lands over the last two decades. Lands which are not theirs according to the UN.
http://edge.passblue.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/SettlementPopulation.png
And LOL if you think it's just the Palestinians getting away with anything.
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/stat/deaths.html
Never have the Palestinians even come close to killing as many Israelis as they've had killed themselves. The closest the ratio has ever been was 1/2. In 2014, it was 2300 Palestinians killed compared to 90.
It might be a slow genocide, but it is still genocide.
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.
No, I am not assuming "get rid of Facebook" is immoral. Using questionable tactics to do so is immoral. In this case suing them for whatever "Terrorism" plot was hatched on it. Just wait until voting for "Unacceptable candidate" of your choice is deemed "Terrorism" by the powers that be. Or whatever tool they used (Zello, Slack, Google Docs, Google+ ....) that you like is also sued for the exact same reason.
No, the problem I have isn't Facebook, it is that two wrongs don't make it right, EVEN IF the result IS what you want, in this particular case. Because at some point down the road, you're gonna run into someone doing the same thing to something you DO like.
No, Facebook hasn't contributed to terrorism, any more than Samsung/Apple/Windows phones have.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.