I really don’t like cases like this, nor do I like how much the legal system seems to be pushing “guilty by proxy” rulings for a lot of school shooting cases.
It just feels very very very dangerous and ’going to be bad’ to set this precedent where when someone commits an atrocity, essentially every person and thing they interacted with can be held accountable with nearly the same weight as if they had committed the crime themselves.
Obviously some basic civil responsibility is needed. If someone says “I am going to blow up XYZ school here is how”, and you hear that, yeah, that’s on you to report it. But it feels like we’re quickly slipping into a point where you have to start reporting a vast amount of people to the police en masse if they say anything even vaguely questionable simply to avoid potential fallout of being associated with someone committing a crime.
It makes me really worried. I really think the internet has made it easy to be able to ‘justifiably’ accuse almost anyone or any business of a crime if a person with enough power / the state needs them put away for a time.
This appears to be more the angle of the person being fed an endless stream of hate on social media and thus becoming radicalised.
What causes them to be fed an endless stream of hate? Algorithms. Who provides those algorithms? Social media companies. Why do they do this? To maintain engagement with their sites so they can make money via advertising.
And so here we are, with sites that see you viewed 65 percent of a stream showing an angry mob, therefore you would like to see more angry mobs in your feed. Is it any wonder that shit like this happens?
It’s also known to intentionally show you content that’s likely to provoke you into fights online
Which just makes all the sanctimonious screed about avoiding echo chambers a bunch of horse shit, because that’s not how outside digital social behavior works, outside the net if you go out of your way to keep arguing with people who wildly disagree with you, your not avoiding echo chambers, you’re building a class action restraining order case against yourself.
I’ve long held this hunch that when people’s beliefs are challenged, they tend to ‘dig in’ and wind up more resolute. (I think it’s actual science and I learned that in a sociology class many years ago but it’s been so long I can’t say with confidence if that’s the case.)
Assuming my hunch is right (or at least right enough), I think that side of social media - driving up engagement by increasing discord also winds up radicalizing people as a side effect of chasing profits.
It’s one of the things I appreciate about Lemmy. Not everyone here seems to just be looking for a fight all the time.
It depends on how their beliefs are challenged. Calling them morons won’t work. You have to gently question them about their ideas and not seem to be judging them.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Another commenter on this post suggested my belief on it was from an Oatmeal comic. That prompted me to search it out, and seeing it spelled out again sort of opened up the memory for me.
The class was a sociology class about 20 years ago, and the professor was talking about cognitive dissonance as it relates to folks choosing whether or not they wanted to adopt the beliefs of another group. I don’t think he got into how to actually challenge beliefs in a constructive way, since he was discussing how seemingly small rifts can turn into big disagreements between social groups, but subsequent life experience and a lot of good articles about folks working with radicals to reform their beliefs confirm exactly what you commented.
People have been fighting online long before algorithmic content suggestions. They may amplify it, but you can’t blame that on them entirely.
The truth is many people would argue and fight like that in real life if they could be anonymous.
Absolutely. Huge difference between hate speech existing. And funneling a firehose of it at someone to keep them engaged. It’s not clear how this will shake out. But I doubt it will be the end of free speech. If it exists and you actively seek it out that’s something else.
I think the design of media products around maximally addictive individually targeted algorithms in combination with content the platform does not control and isn’t responsible for is dangerous. Such an algorithm will find the people most susceptible to everything from racist conspiracy theories to eating disorder content and show them more of that. Attempts to moderate away the worst examples of it just result in people making variations that don’t technically violate the rules.
With that said, laws made and legal precedents set in response to tragedies are often ill-considered, and I don’t like this case. I especially don’t like that it includes Reddit, which was not using that type of individualized algorithm to my knowledge.
This is the real shit right here. The problem is that social media companies’ data show that negativity and hate keep people on their website for longer, which means that they view more advertisement compared to positivity.
It is human nature to engage with disagreeable topics moreso than agreeable topics, and social media companies are exploiting that for profit.
We need to regulate algorithms and force them to be open source, so that anybody can audit them. They will try to hide behind “AI” and “trade secret” excuses, but lawmakers have to see above that bullshit.
Unfortunately, US lawmakers are both stupid and corrupt, so it’s unlikely that we’ll see proper change, and more likely that we’ll see shit like “banning all social media from foreign adversaries” when the US-based social media companies are largely the cause of all these problems. I’m sure the US intelligence agencies don’t want them to change either, since those companies provide large swaths of personal data to them.
Attempts to moderate away the worst examples of it just result in people making variations that don’t technically violate the rules.
The problem then becomes if the clearly defined rules aren’t enough, then the people that run these sites need to start making individual judgment calls based on…well, their gut, really. And that creates a lot of issues if the site in question could be held accountable for making a poor call or overlooking something.
The threat of legal repercussions hanging over them is going to make them default to the most strict actions, and that’s kind of a problem if there isn’t a clear definition of what things need to be actioned against.
It’s the chilling effect they use in China, don’t make it clear what will get you in trouble and then people are too scared to say anything
Just another group looking to control expression by the back door
Nah. This isn’t guilt by association
In her decision, the judge said that the plaintiffs may proceed with their lawsuit, which claims social media companies — like Meta, Alphabet, Reddit and 4chan — ”profit from the racist, antisemitic, and violent material displayed on their platforms to maximize user engagement,”
Which despite their denials the actually know: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-knew-radicalized-users-rcna3581
Yeah, but algorithmic delivery of radicalizing content seems kinda evil though.
I think the distinction here is between people and businesses. Is it the fault of people on social media for the acts of others? No. Is it the fault of social media for cultivating an environment that radicalizes people into committing mass shootings? Yes. The blame here is on the social medias for not doing more to stop the spread of this kind of content. Because yes even though that won’t stop this kind of content from existing making it harder to access and find will at least reduce the number of people who will go down this path.
Is it the fault of social media for cultivating an environment that radicalizes people into committing mass shootings? Yes.
Really? Then add videogames and heavy metal to the list. And why not most organized religions? Same argument, zero sense. There’s way more at play than Person watches X content = person is now radicalized, unless we’re talking about someone with severe cognitive deficit.
And since this is the US… perhaps add easy access to guns? Nah, that’s totally unrelated.
“Person watches X creative and clearly fictional content” is not analogous in any way to “person watches X video essay crafted to look like a documentary, but actually just full of lies and propaganda”
Don’t be ridiculous
So it’s the severe cognitive deficit. Ok. Watching anything inherently bad and thinking it’s ok to do so becauses it seems legit… that’s ridiculous.
I mean, yes. People are stupid. That’s why we have safety regulations. This court case is about a lack of safety regulations.
Systemic problems require systemic solutions.
Sure, and I get that for like, healthcare. But ‘systemic solutions’ as they pertain to “what constitutes a crime” lead to police states really quickly imo
This wasn’t just a content issue. Reddit actively banned people for reporting violent content too much. They literally engaged with and protected these communities, even as people yelled that they were going to get someone hurt.
Do you not think if someone encouraged a murderer they should be held accountable? It’s not everyone they interacted with, there has to be reasonable suspicion they contributed.
Also I’m pretty sure this is nothing new
Depends on what you mean by “encouraged”. That is going to need a very precise definition in these cases.
And the point isn’t that people shouldn’t be held accountable, it’s that there are a lot of gray areas here, we need to be careful how we navigate them. Irresponsible rulings or poorly implemented laws can destabilize everything that makes the internet worthwhile.
I didn’t say that at all, and I think you know I didn’t unless you really didn’t actually read my comment.
I am not talking about encouraging someone to murder. I specifically said that in overt cases there is some common sense civil responsibility. I am talking about the potential for the the police to break down your door because you Facebook messaged a guy you’re friends with what your favorite local gun store was, and that guy also happens to listen to death metal and take antidepressants and the state has deemed him a risk factor level 3.
I must have misunderstood you then, but this still seems like a pretty clear case where the platforms, not even people yet did encourage him. I don’t think there’s any new precedent being set here
Rulings often start at the corporation / large major entity level and work their way down to the individual. Think piracy laws. At first, only giant, clear bootlegging operations were really prosecuted for that, and then people torrenting content for profit, and then people torrenting large amounts of content for free - and now we currently exist in an environment where you can torrent a movie or whatever and probably be fine, but also if the criminal justice system wants to they can (and have) easily hit anyone who does with a charge for tens of thousands of dollars or years of jail time.
Will it happen to the vast majority of people who torrent media casually? No. But we currently exist in an environment where if you get unlucky enough or someone wants to punish you for it enough, you can essentially have this massive sentence handed down to you almost “at random”.
Everyone on lemmy who makes guillotine jokes will enjoy their life sentence I’m sure
Is there currently a national crisis of Jacobins kidnapping oligarchs and beheading them in public I am unaware of?
No
Unfortunately
Also worth remembering, this opens up avenues for lawsuits on other types of “harm”.
We have states that have outlawed abortion. What do those sites do when those states argue social media should be “held accountable” for all the women who are provided information on abortion access through YouTube, Facebook, reddit, etc?
I dunno about social media companies but I quite agree that the party who got the gunman the gun should share the punishment for the crime.
Firearms should be titled and insured, and the owner should have an imposed duty to secure, and the owner ought to face criminal penalty if the firearm titled to them was used by someone else to commit a crime, either they handed a killer a loaded gun or they inadequately secured a firearm which was then stolen to be used in committing a crime, either way they failed their responsibility to society as a firearm owner and must face consequences for it.
This guy seems to have bought the gun legally at a gun store, after filling out the forms and passing the background check. You may be thinking of the guy in Maine whose parents bought him a gun when he was obviously dangerous. They were just convicted of involuntary manslaughter for that, iirc.
Yup, I was just addressing the point of tangential arrest, sometimes it is well justified.
Well you were talking about charging the gun owner if someone else commits a crime with their gun. That’s unrelated to this case where the shooter was the gun owner.
The lawsuit here is about radicalization but if we’re pursuing companies who do that, I’d start with Fox News.
If you lend your brother, who you know is on antidepressants, a long extension cord he tells you is for his back patio - and he hangs himself with it, are you ready to be accused of being culpable for your brothers death?
Oh, it turns out an extension cord has a side use that isn’t related to its primary purpose. What’s the analogous innocuous use of a semiautomatic handgun?
Self defense? You don’t have to be a 2A diehard to understand that it’s still a legal object. What’s the “innocuous use” of a VPN? Or a torrenting client? Should we imprison everyone who ever sends a link about one of these to someone who seems interested in their use?
You’re deliberately ignoring the point that the primary use of a semiautomatic pistol is killing people, whether self-defense or mass murder.
Should you be culpable for giving your brother an extension cord if he lies that it is for the porch? Not really.
Should you be culpable for giving your brother a gun if he lies that he needs it for self defense? IDK the answer, but it’s absolutely not equivalent.
It is a higher level of responsibility, you know lives are in danger if you give them a tool for killing. I don’t think it’s unreasonable if there is a higher standard for loaning it out or leaving it unsecured.
“Sorry bro. I’d love to go target shooting with you, but you started taking Vynase 6 months ago and I’m worried if you blow your brains out the state will throw me in prison for 15 years”.
Besides, youre ignoring the point. This article isn’t about a gun, it’s about basically “this person saw content we didn’t make on our website”. You think that wont be extended to general content sent from a person to another? That if you send some pro-Palestine articles to your buddy and then a year or two later your buddy gets busted at an anti-Zionist rally and now you’re a felon because you enabled that? Boy, that would be an easy way for some hypothetical future administrations to control speech!!
You might live in a very nice bubble, but not everyone will.
So you need a strawman argument transitioning from loaning a weapon unsupervised to someone we know is depressed. Now it is just target shooting with them, so distancing the loan aspect and adding a presumption of using the item together.
This is a side discussion. You are the one who decided to write strawman arguments relating guns to extension cords, so I thought it was reasonable to respond to that. It seems like you’re upset that your argument doesn’t make sense under closer inspection and you want to pull the ejection lever to escape. Okay, it’s done.
The article is about a civil lawsuit, nobody is going to jail. Nobody is going to be able to take a precedent and sue me, an individual, over sharing articles to friends and family, because the algorithm is a key part of the argument.
Did he also use it as improvised ammunition to shoot up the local elementary school with the chord to warrant it being considered a firearm?
I’m more confused where I got such a lengthy extension chord from! Am I an event manager? Do I have generators I’m running cable from? Do I get to meet famous people on the job? Do I specialize in fairground festivals?
…. Aside from everything else, are you under the impression that a 10-15 ft extension cord is an odd thing to own…?
And ironically the gun manufacturers or politicians who support lax gun laws are not included in these “nets”. A radicalized individual with a butcher knife can’t possibly do as much damage as one with a gun.
Add Fox news and Trump rallies to the list.
Don’t forget Marilyn Manson and videogames.
/s
Marilyn Manson led a charge to overthrow the government??
Doubt it. Last time I saw him on stage, he made trump look like an eloquent speaker.
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Because I don’t like than an artist I once enjoyed is a drugged out and drunken mess? Based on the reaction it definitely sounds like it.
Didn’t think that many lemmings likes washed up has been metal acts, but to each their own I guess.
I actually responded to the wrong person and I apologize. I’ve actually heard the same thing about MM lately – just washed-up and sad.
Idk why you’re getting downvoted for an obvious joke lol
Because it’s not funny or relevant and is an attempt to join two things - satanic panic with legal culpability in social media platforms.
Not relevant?
Metal music and videos games have been blamed for mass shootings before.
And this is neither of those things. This is something much more tangible, with actual science behind it.
Yes, that exactly is the point.
How people who supposedly care for children’s safety are willing to ignore science and instead choose to hue and cry about bullshit stuff they perceive (or told by their favourite TV personality) as evil.
Have you got it now? Or should I explain it further?
Didn’t expect Lemmy to have people who lack reading comprehension.
People don’t appreciate having spurious claims attached to their legitimate claims, even in jest. It invokes the idea that since the previous targets of blame were false that these likely are as well.
They’re all external factors. Music and videogames have been (wrongly, imo) blamed in the past. Media, especially nowadays, is probably more “blameable” than music and games, but i still think it’s bs to use external factors as an excuse to justify mass shootings.
What are the internal factors of a person that are not influenced by the environment or culture?
Back when I was on reddit, I subscribed to about 120 subreddits. Starting a couple years ago though, I noticed that my front page really only showed content for 15-20 subreddits at a time and it was heavily weighted towards recent visits and interactions.
For example, if I hadn’t visited r/3DPrinting in a couple weeks, it slowly faded from my front page until it disappeared all together. It was so bad that I ended up writing a browser automation script to visit all 120 of my subreddits at night and click the top link. This ended up giving me a more balanced front page that mixed in all of my subreddits and interests.
My point is these algorithms are fucking toxic. They’re focused 100% on increasing time on page and interaction with zero consideration for side effects. I would love to see social media algorithms required by law to be open source. We have a public interest in knowing how we’re being manipulated.
I used google news phone widget years ago and clicked on a giant asteroid article, and for whatever reason my entire feed became asteroid/meteor articles. Its also just such a dumb way to populate feeds.
Yo dawg, I heard you like asteroids. So I populated your entire feed with articles about asteroids.
Yeah, social media algorithms are doing a lot of damage. I wish there was more general awareness of this. Based on personal experience, I think many people actually like being fed relevant content, and are blind to the consequences. I think Lemmy is great, because you have to curate your own feed, but many people would never use it for that very reason. I don’t know what the solution is.
YouTube does the exact same thing.
thats why i always use youtube by subscribed first, then only delve into regular front page if theres nothing interesting in my subscriptions
Please let me know if you want me to testify that reddit actively protected white supremacist communities and even banned users who engaged in direct activism against these communities
I was banned for activism against genocide. Reddit is a shithole.
i was banned for similar reasons.
seems like a lot of mods just have the ability to say whatever about whoever and the admins just nuke any account they target.
I have noticed a massive drop in the quality of posting in Reddit over the last year. It was on a decline, but there was a massive drop off.
It’s anecdotal to what I have read off Lemmy, but a lot of high Karma accounts have been nuked due to mods and admins being ridiculously over zealous in handing out permabans.
Well yeah it is but… what did you think would happen?
Send your evidence to the lawyers, couldn’t hurt.
Nice, now do all regigions and churches next
YouTube feeds me so much right wing bullshit I’m constantly marking it as not interested. It’s a definite problem.
It’s amazing how often I get a video from some right wing source suggested to me companting about censorship and being buried by youtube. I ended up installing a third party channel blocker to deal with it.
I can’t prove that they were related but I used to report all conservative ads (Hillsdale Epoch times etc) to Google with all caps messages how I was going to start calling the advertisers directly and yell at them for the ads, about 2-3 days after I started doing that the ads stopped.
I would love for other people to start doing this to confirm that it works and to be free of the ads.
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Can you try my method and see if it works? I am really curious
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That worked for me also. I like a lot of sports docs on YouTube. That triggered non stop Joe Rogan suggestions and ads for all kinds of right wing news trash.
I quit drinking years ago and I reported every (e alcohol) ad explaining that I am no longer their target market and the ads are literally dangerous to me. They were gone within a few weeks - haven’t seen a booze ad in 5+ years.
YouTube started feeding me that stuff too. Weirdly once I started reporting all of them as misinformation they stop showing up for some reason…
I just would like to show something about Reddit. Below is a post I made about how Reddit was literally harassing and specifically targeting me, after I let slip in a comment one day that I was sober - I had previously never made such a comment because my sobriety journey was personal, and I never wanted to define myself or pigeonhole myself as a “recovering person”.
I reported the recommended subs and ads to Reddit Admins multiple times and was told there was nothing they could do about it.
I posted a screenshot to DangerousDesign and it flew up to like 5K+ votes in like 30 minutes before admins removed it. I later reposted it to AssholeDesign where it nestled into 2K+ votes before shadow-vanishing.
Yes, Reddit and similar are definitely responsible for a lot of suffering and pain at the expense of humans in the pursuit of profit. After it blew up and front-paged, “magically” my home page didn’t have booze related ads/subs/recs any more! What a totally mystery how that happened /s
The post in question, and a perfect “outing” of how Reddit continually tracks and tailors the User Experience specifically to exploit human frailty for their own gains.
Edit: Oh and the hilarious part that many people won’t let go (when shown this) is that it says it’s based on my activity in the Drunk reddit which I had never once been to, commented in, posted in, or was even aware of. So that just makes it worse.
Its not reddit if posts don’t get nuked or shadowbanned by literal sitewide admins
Yes I was advised in the removal notice that it had been removed by the Reddit Administrators so that they could keep Reddit “safe”.
I guess their idea of “safe” isn’t 4+ million users going into their privacy panel and turning off exploitative sub recommendations.
Idk though I’m just a humble bird lawyer.
“Noooo it’s our algorithm we can’t be held liable for the program we made specifically to discover what people find a little interesting and keep feeding it to them!”
I wonder if you built a social media site where the main feature was that the algorithm just showed you things in sequential order like in the old days, would it be popular
I enjoy using Lemmy mostly that way, just sorting the feed by new / hot / whatever and looking at new posts of random shit. Much more entertaining than video-spamming bullshit.
No, there is too much content for that nowadays. YouTube has over 3 million new videos each day. Facebook, TikTok, Instagram also has ridiculous amounts of new posts every day. Browsing Reddit on New was a terrible experience on r/all or even many of the bigger subs. Even on the fediverse sorting by new is not enjoyable. You are swarmed with reposts, and content that’s entirely uninteresting to you.
It works in smaller communities but there it isn’t really necessary. You usually have an overview of all the content anyhow and it doesn’t matter how it’s ordered.
Any social media that plans on scaling up needs a more advanced system.
People complain about mastodons lack of algorithms a lot. Its part of how misskey, ice shrimp, and catodon came to be
So a paper encyclopedia set? How is Britannica doing?
I find it very weird to be living in a country legalizing drugs and assisted suicide (even for depression) but simultaneously trying to severely curtail free speech, media freedom and passing legislation to jail people at risk of breaking the law who don’t meet the “conspiracy to commit” threshold".
What exactly are you referring to here?
Been on the canadian news the last few days, federal Liberals are trying to bring in pre-crime legislation.
This thread is about a mass shooter from New York. Are you lost?
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I gave up reporting on major sites where I saw abuse. Stuff that if you said that in public, also witnessed by others, you’ve be investigated. Twitter was also bad for responding to reports with “this doesnt break our rules” when a) it clearly did and b) probably a few laws.
I gave up after I was told that people DMing me photographs of people committing suicide was not harassment but me referencing Yo La Tengo’s album “I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass” was worthy of a 30 day ban
On youtube I had a persistent one who only stopped threatening to track me down and kill me (for a road safety video) when I posted the address of a local police station and said “pop in, any time!”
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Laws against threats to kill, rape and assault tend to be pretty constant across the world… 🤷♂️
Americans online regularly tell me that that’s protected free speech down there! Haha
That’s true, but a lotnof things are illegal eeverywhere. Sexual Harassment or death treads will get you a lawsuit in probably every single country of the world.
Lawsuits are for civil cases. If someone breaks a law, they’re charged by authorities at their discretion.
media: Video games cause violence
media: Weird music causes violence.
media: Social media could never cause violence this is censorship (also we don’t want to pay moderators)
Since media (that you define by the trophes of unsubtantiated news outlets) couldnt sensibly refer to a forum like reddit or even facebook, this makes no sense.
Excuse me what in the Kentucky fried fuck?
As much as everyone says fuck these big guys all day this hurts everyone.
Sweet, I’m sure this won’t be used by AIPAC to sue all the tech companies for causing October 7th somehow like unrwa and force them to shutdown or suppress all talk on Palestine. People hearing about a genocide happening might radicalize them, maybe we could get away with allowing discussion but better safe then sorry, to the banned words list it goes.
This isn’t going to end in the tech companies hiring a team of skilled moderators who understand the nuance between passion and radical intention trying to preserve a safe space for political discussion, that costs money. This is going to end up with a dictionary of banned and suppressed words.
Plus more demands for brackdoors in encryption.
This is going to end up with a dictionary of banned and suppressed word
Do you have some examples?
It’s already out there. For example you can’t use the words “Suicide” or “rape” or “murder” in YouTube, TikTok etc. even when the discussion is clearly about trying to educate people. Heck, you can’t even mention Onlyfans on Twitch…
Heck, you can’t even mention Onlyfans on Twitch…
They don’t like users mentioning their direct competition
I think there’s definitely a case to be made that recommendation algorithms, etc. constitute editorial control and thus the platform may not be immune to lawsuits based on user posts.
I will testify under oath with evidence that Reddit, the company, has not only turned a blind eye to but also encouraged and intentfully enabled radicalization on their platform. It is the entire reason I am on Lemmy. It is the entire reason for my username. It is the reason I questioned my allyship with certain marginalized communities. It is the reason I tense up at the mention of turtles.
Right in the IPO price!
