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.

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

Systemic problems require systemic solutions.

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: nbcnews.com/…/facebook-knew-radicalized-users-rcn…

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?

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?

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.

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.

I don’t think you understand the issue. I’m very disappointed to see that this is the top comment. This wasn’t an accident. These social media companies deliberately feed people the most upsetting and extreme material they can. They’re intentionally radicalizing people to make money from engagement.

They’re absolutely responsible for what they’ve done, and it isn’t “by proxy”, it’s extremely direct and deliberate. It’s long past time that courts held them liable. What they’re doing is criminal.

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.

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.

I agree with you, but ... I was on reddit since the Digg exodus. It always had it's bad side (violentacrez, jailbait, etc), but it got so much worse after GamerGate/Ellen Pao - the misogyny became weaponized. And then the alt-right moved in, deliberately trying to radicalize people, and we worked so. fucking. hard to keep their voices out of our subreddits. And we kept reporting users and other subreddits that were breaking rules, promoting violence and hatred, and all fucking spez would do is shrug and say, "hey it's a free speech issue", which was somewhere between "hey, I agree with those guys" and "nah, I can't be bothered".

So it's not like this was something reddit wasn't aware of (I'm not on Facebook or YouTube). They were warned, repeatedly, vehemently, starting all the way back in 2014, that something was going wrong with their platform and they need to do something. And they deliberately and repeatedly choose to ignore it, all the way up to the summer of 2021. Seven fucking years of warnings they ignored, from a massive range of users and moderators, including some of the top moderators on the site. And all reddit would do is shrug it's shoulders and say, "hey, free speech!" like it was a magic wand, and very occasionally try to defend itself by quoting it's 'hate speech policy', which they invoke with the same regular repetitiveness and 'thoughts and prayers' inaction as a school shooting brings. In fact, they did it in this very article:

In a statement to CNN, Reddit said, “Hate and violence have no place on Reddit. Our sitewide policies explicitly prohibit content that promotes hate based on identity or vulnerability, as well as content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or group of people. We are constantly evaluating ways to improve our detection and removal of this content, including through enhanced image-hashing systems, and we will continue to review the communities on our platform to ensure they are upholding our rules.”

As someone who modded for a number of years, that's just bullshit.

Edit: fuck spez.

Ohh u didnt report someone ur also guilty cant see any problems with this.

That’s… not what this is about, though?

“However, plaintiffs contend the defendants’ platforms are more than just message boards,” the court document says. “They allege they are sophisticated products designed to be addictive to young users and they specifically directed Gendron to further platforms or postings that indoctrinated him with ‘white replacement theory’,” the decision read.

This isn’t about mandated reporting, it’s about funneling impressionable people towards extremist content.

You could make a good point with better spelling, grammar, and word choice.

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So if some random hacker takes over your network connection and publishes illegal content which then leads back to you, you should be held responsible. It's your platform after all.

Content creators should be held responsible for their content. Platforms are mere distributors, in general terms, otherwise you’re blaming the messenger.

Specific to social media (and television) yes, they bank on hate, it’s known - so don’t use them or do so with that ever dwindling human quality called critical thinking. Wanting to hold them accountable for murder is just dismissing the real underlying issues, like unsupervised impressionable people watching content, easy access to guns, human nature itself, societal issues…

Then user generated content completely disappears.

Without the basic protection of section 230, it’s not possible to allow users to exist or interact with anything. I’m not sure you could even pay for web hosting without it.

Moderation is already draconian, interact with any gen Z and you gonna know what goon, corn, unalive, (crime) in Minecraft, actually mean.

These aren’t slangs, this is like a second language developed to evade censorship from those platforms, things will only get worse.

Judge hasn’t ruled yet, this was just them saying the case has some merit and won’t be dismissed. This will go to trial, after which the judge will make their ruling.

Reading comprehension is important. As is a highschool level understanding of how our legal system works.

This is going to end up with a dictionary of banned and suppressed word

Do you have some examples?

Plus more demands for brackdoors in encryption.

Don’t forget Marilyn Manson and videogames.

/s

Ask those parents in the Michigan case

You mean the “responsible gun owners” who don’t properly secure their weapons from a child?

I couldn’t work this out from the article is it the parents raising this suit or the victims families?

I was banned for activism against genocide. Reddit is a shithole.

Send your evidence to the lawyers, couldn’t hurt.

Completely different cases, questionable comparison;

• social media are the biggest cultural industry at the moment, albeit a silent and unnoticed one. Cultural industries like this are means of propaganda, information and socilalization, all of which is impactful and heavily personal and personalised for everyone’s opinion.

• thus the role of such an impactul business is huge and can move opinions and whole movements, the choices that people takes are driven by their media consumption and communities they take part in.

• In other words, policy, algorhitms, GUI are all factors that drive the users to engage in speific ways with harmful content.

The examples you came up with hit that last line to a T!

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Yeah, good thing we don’t have evidence of any social media company’s algorithms radicalizing and promoting more and more extreme content to people.

Could you imagine? Companies actively radicalizing people for money??

Facebook will have actively pushed this stuff. Reddit will have just ignored it, and YouTube just feeds your own bubble back to you.

YouTube doesn’t radicalize people, it only increases their existing radicalization, but the process must start elsewhere, and to be completely fair they do put warnings and links to further information on the bottom of questionable videos, and they also delist quite a lot of stuff as well.

I don’t know what’s better to completely block conspiracy theory videos or to allow them and then have other people mock them.

Facebook and others actively promote harmful content because they know it drives interactions, I believe it’s possible to punish corps without making the internet overly policed.

I agree with you in spirit. The most common sentiment I see among the comments is not to limit what people can share but how actively platforms move people down rabbit holes. If there is not action on the part of the platforms to correct for this, they risk regulation which in turn puts freedom of speech at risk.

This may seem baseless, but I have seen this from years of experience in online forums. You don’t have to take it seriously, but maybe you can relate. We have seen time and time again that if there is no moderation then the shit floats to the top. The reason being that when people can’t post something creative or fun, but they still want the attention, they will post negative. It’s the loud minority, but it’s a very dedicated loud minority. Let’s say we have 5 people and 4 of them are very creative time and funny, but 1 of them complains all the time. If they make posts to the same community then there is a very good chance that the one negative person will make a lot more posts than the 4 creative types.

Not just “remain visible” - actively promoted. There’s a reason people talk about Youtube’s right-wing content pipeline. If you start watching anything male-oriented, Youtube will start slowly promoting more and more right-wing content to you until you’re watching Ben Shaprio and Andrew Tate

What about youtube? That had actually paid those people to spread their sick ideas, making the world a worst place and getting rich while doing it.

“But freedom of speech”

If that speech causes harm like convincing a teenager walking into a grocery store and gunning people down is a good idea, you don’t deserve to have that speech.

In Germany we have a very good rule for this(its not written down, but that’s something you can usually count onto). Your freedom ends, where it violates the freedom of others. Examples for this: Everyone has the right to live a healthy life and everyone has the right to walk wherever you want. If I now take my right to walk wherever to want to cause a car accident with people getting hurt(and it was only my fault). My freedom violated the right that the person who has been hurt to life a healthy life. That’s not freedom.

Ok…don’t complain to me later when the thing you like gets taken down.

for fascists, violent racist or their enablers.

Take a good long look in the mirror (and a dictionary printed before 2005) before you say things like this.

most of the content on YouTube, Facebook and Reddit is not generated by the companies themselves

Its their job to block that content before it reaches an audience, but since thats how they make their money, they dont or wont do that. The monetization of evil is the problem, those platforms are the biggest perpetrators.

Those sites determine what they promote. Such sites often promote extreme views as it gets people to watch or view the next thing. Facebook for instance researched this outcome, then ignored that knowledge.

is the pusher guilty? last time I checked he didn’t grow the poppies or process them into heroin.

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

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Do you mean “behind” like responsible for or in favor of?

Lol, yeah I moderated major trans subreddits for years. It was entirely hit and miss if we’d get support from the admins

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 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".

Who is this “Four Chan”?

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.

Is fucking insane how much that happens I stopped using Instagram for that reason at least yt listened to my “not interested” choices. I also have revnaced so IDK what ads it would shoot at me.

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.

YouTube started feeding me that stuff too. Weirdly once I started reporting all of them as misinformation they stop showing up for some reason…

Justice isn’t a zero sum game. More than one person can contribute to the same crime.

So now anyone who says things is going to be held accountable for crazy people being crazy

Nope, that’s just you being melodramatic. The judge has acknowledged there is grounds for the case to be argued so it won’t he dismissed. That’s all. They haven’t been found guilty of anything. They’re not being lined up and shot.

What would you prefer we did to determine if a company is culpable? Just ask you because you read a headline?

Its not reddit if posts don’t get nuked or shadowbanned by literal sitewide admins

Yeah this happens a lot more than people think. I used to work at a hotel, and when the large sobriety group got together yearly, they changed bar hours from the normal hours, to as close to 24/7 as they could legally get. They also raised the prices on alcohol.

YouTube does the exact same thing.

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.

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.

I agree. It’s important to remember the only “conspiracy” is making money and keeping people on the platform. That said, it will cause people to go down rabbit holes. The solution isn’t as simple as “show people content they disagree with” because they either ignore it or it creates another rabbit hole. For example, it would mean that progressives start getting bombarded with Tim Pool videos. I don’t believe Tim is intentionally “alt right” but that’s exactly why his videos are the most dangerous. They consist of nothing but conservative rage bait with a veneer of progressiveness that allows his viewers to believe they aren’t being manipulated.

Same as sort settings for subscribed.

Active, top for the past x hours/days/month/all, new, etc. You pick, Lemmy doesn’t.

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.

Or individuals who repeatedly spreading the specific hateful ideology that radicalize people and also encourages them to act on it