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Social Media Giants Sued For Helping ISIS (torontosun.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader nnet quotes the Toronto Sun: Social media giants Twitter, Google and Facebook are being sued by the families of victims of the San Bernardino terror attacks. The lawsuit claims those companies aided ISIS by letting them build their online profile and bolster recruitment. Fourteen people were killed in the December 2015 attacks by twisted husband-wife Islamist extremists Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik. "Without defendants Twitter, Facebook and Google (YouTube), the explosive growth of IS over the last few years into the most feared terrorist group in the world would not have been possible," the suit, filed Wednesday in Los Angeles, alleges.
As much as I feel for the families of those who were killed, there isn't much you can do. This lawsuit just feels like a desperate attempt at answers where they don't exist.
No court would expect the operators of social networks to pour billions of dollars into moderating their platforms. They can remove content when its found and reported, but it is completely unreasonable to expect the operators of social media platforms to keep their platforms free of terrorist material while at the same time keeping it open enough to be usable.
They are going to sue manufacturer of the SUV which was used by terrorists to escape?
Let's just enact martial law nationwide. These dangerous things named "streets" are places were criminals can meet and gather.
Doesn't the Communications Decency Act give social media companies immunity in cases like this?
I see what you did there.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Social media is a bad idea for humanity in the first place. Since it's too late to close that Pandora's box, we really have to take what comes of it. You make a gun, some people will use it to kill. You make a giant communication platform, some terrorists will use it. It is up to people whether they want these things to be allowed in their society or not. Once we are allowed them there is little that can be done about the ramifications.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
This is the *only* way we can even hope to held the enablers responsible for their actions: financially.
I'm not fan of social networking but I realize that they are just tools for communication. By their logic, everyone that has forwarded communication technologies (e.g. telephones and internet) has also enabled them. Social networking isn't a weapon, it cannot hurt people. Perhaps they should go after the people who do sell things that are used exclusively to hurt people.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
This lawsuit won't last long. When the NSA and CIA have a vested interest in having Islamists out in the open and posting on well-known networks, there will have been many times they asked Twitter, Google and Facebook for communications, to leave accounts open etc to monitor contributors. For this reason, this suit will go nowhere. The agencies don't want the tech companies to admit it, the tech companies don't want to admit it, and the agencies REALLY don't want eavesdropping tools to be taken away from them. Primarily for this last reason, nothing will happen here.
No way organizing others' content on their sites exposes them to liability.
You couldn't be more wrong. The real root is some humans being assholes. That's not related and not correlating with religion. Some religions are perfectly peaceful and you don't need to be religious to be an asshole. Even ISIS is barely religious, it's just an excuse they use.
If they didn't provide water to terrorists, how could they survive?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Oxygen has also been sued for helping to keep terrorists alive.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
I've never understood the common reaction of those grieving from a tragedy to demand *financial compensation*. Their family members died, not them! Why do they think they are entitled to money at all? The only explanation is that they are greedy bastards who only care about themselves and see an opportunity to take advantage of the tragic situation. It's sickening.
It would be one thing if they were taking a stand to fight against an unjust system, but they're not doing that at all. They should all be ashamed of themselves. I'm sure they're already working out book deals and film rights to milk it even further. Pathetic.
didn't trump just sign some thing last week to purposely let religion do this? >_>
Well I'm in Canada but yes, he signed a bill or order that lets religious people discriminate against others, because they have an invisible, non-existent friend.
Chances are it's your various governments, American, European, Russia etc. As usual it's just business.
Here this is just plain old scapegoating to control the medium and individual communications. Standard stuff. You go with what works.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Saudi Arabia falls and the Sunni Wahabi Jihadist movement is crushed.
Saudi Arabia is the "Nazi Germany" of the War on Terrorism. ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and all these terrorist groups are actually Saudi front Armies. The people suing FaceBook, Google, etc. are actually suing free speech.
Stopping what's going on would require basically every country in the world to stop fighting over fossil fuels, invest in renewable resources that do not come from the middle east, and developing weapons that make the Jihadists incapable of hurting us, such as Force fields in Vehicles, and Air craft they can't shoot down. The step after that is to tell the Saudi Royal Family that started this, its over.
The bill lets people who have the same invisible, non-existent friend as the president and most of the rest of the elected government (who are supposed to keep church and state separate) to discriminate against people who have a different invisible, non-existent friend. However it is still wrong for those other people with the different invisible, non-existent friend to discriminate against people who have the same invisible, non-existent friend as the president.
Please note that some people do have the same invisible, non-existent friend as the president but it's okay to discriminate against them because they read from a book that has most of the same information as the president's book but tells it in a bit different way.
Instead of blaming Social Media, why not get rid of the root problem, religion?
If we didn't kill each other over gods, we'd kill each other over economic systems or text editors. People require a good excuse to be bad people, but it doesn't really matter what the excuse is.
The second Iraq war was fought on the pretext of "freedom" and "democracy". How about we get rid of those? That'd fix the problem, right?
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
After all, THEY let the bad guys ON TO the Internet! I'm sorry, I feel for these people but come on...
Why not also sue the manufacturer of the weapons they used? Why not sue the auto manufacturer who made the car they drove in? Why not sue the farmers who grew the cotton used to make their clothing - because no self-respecting jihadist likes going on a shooting rampage while naked.
Better sue the company that made the vehicle the shooters used to go to and from the attack. Also better sue the gun manufacturers for making the weapons the shooters used. While we're at it, we should sue Walmart and some other stores for providing food and clothing to keep the shooters alive until they could kill their victims. Lastly, sue the people who rented the shooters their apartment that kept them safely sheltered until they were able to go on their rampage.
I know some well-educated people who are religiously very devout. One of them blows up at people who annoy him too much while remaining theologically correct.
What education is likely to do is reduce the role of religion in governance, which I consider a Good Thing about education. Organized religion and politics should not mix.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Frighteningly, there are those far from the Light who use neither vim nor emacs. Obviously we need a crusade or two.
Seriously, if you look back in history, revolutionary movements often tended to adopt a local heresy as justification for their actions and to provide a bigger "us-them" boundary. The battles between Spain and the Ottomans for control of the Mediterranean in the 1500s were easily justified as Christian vs. Muslim, but they were mostly just Great Power struggles.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Yup, that's very accurate. My point is that pretext heresies don't have to be religious.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
The israel-based SITE intelligence group, which was the source for all those weirdly well-produced "ISIS" videos in 2014, was the source of the claim that Farook's wife was radicalized in a private jihadist Facebook group that SITE had magically joined and had happened to be monitoring before the San Bernadino attack. SITE never provised evidence for this claim, but the media ran it, anyway. Anyone claiming ISIS has an effective social media front is full of shit.