I call this "externalization of costs". Private companies skim off the profit and leave the costs to society - be it in construction with the ÖPP (public-private-partnership) or "lease back" scams, or with social media where the victims of mobbing/nazis and police have to suffer.
I call it converting social capital into financial capital. People had friends, shared experiences, went to events and so on before Facebook somehow inserted itself into all these interactions.
Jailing Facebook executives over the consequences of the right-wing resurgence they enabled makes about as much sense as jailing the actual conservative voters and politicians who are implementing it. It sure would be satisfying, but there are lines you don’t cross.
But the German constitution is a result of the Holocaust. We know that it is possible for unrestricted free speech to enable people to libel entire races and religions to the extent that it results in genocide. Every wave of mass violence or ethnic cleansing in the 20th century has been preceded by a propaganda effort to demonise the victims.
> jailing the actual conservative voters and politicians
It looks like in America they're going to end up going to jail for being unregistered agents of foreign intelligence services, and the good old standby of failing to declare bribes to the tax authorities.
The Nazis were continually repressed by mob violence and later by the state. Hitler specifically credits this repression as strengthening their convictions and helping them recruit.
That is, restrictions on freedom of speech led to the Nazis.
The Nazis had their own paramilitaries to start mob violence, and in Britain the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cable_Street is credited with preventing the rise of Fascism in the UK. Effectively it's where the "antifa" movement comes from.
If I read the article correctly, I could make a manifestly unlawful comment in this textbox by saying something libelous about you and presumably make ycombinator liable for a fine because you're a German citizen. What's more, under the law the burden of proof of the libel is placed on ycombinator, not you, or even myself who produced the content in the first place. Incredible.
And the scientist doesn't attack people the chimera does. The analogy is not poor. Perhaps a better example would be that the scientist gave a bunch of machine guns to kinder gardeners. Would you say that the machine guns don't shoot people the kinder gardeners do?
big tech has basically monopolized the market, but if we enact laws of responsibility, they could be ones that make it even harder to disrupt the monopolies already in power
Note that Germany's "Facebook law" doesn't apply to social media platforms with less than 2 million users, which shows they took steps to protect small businesses from the compliance burden.
In the case of digital companies or spaces like Facebook this has only recently reached public discourse. Which makes it so much more problematic because they already have two billion users on the planet. It took Volkswagen a hundred years to get where they are now and the way we manage them has naturally followed. We are not up to speed at all as far as internet giants are concerned.
To address one point in the article, I find the deflection of responsibility on facebook's part alarming. Imagine a scientist letting a wild chimera loose on the population, would we not hold them accountable? Companies like Facebook are getting rich off the infrastructure they provide, they are responsible for the consequences of the technology they put out into the world.
And also notably, in the digital space they have acquired the size of nation states, and even that might be an understatement. Facebook is essentially the policeman, the firefighter, the inkeeper and the landlord all at the same time. As well as the sole administrator.