Re:We Can't Just Assume that Facebook Will Do Its Best
by HarryHirsch on Saturday January 26, 2019 @11:44AM
(#19007021)
When your actions have an impact on the world it's meaningless to make a distinction between negligence and criminal intent. The victims of the Whatsapp riots in India or of the Facebook-driven pogroms in Myanmar don't care if Facebook was the actor or the enabler. These people are dead, they don't have the luxury of caring.
Re:We Can't Just Assume that Facebook Will Do Its Best
by abapologist on Saturday January 26, 2019 @02:32PM
(#19007947)
This argument would call for an end to the distinction between manslaughter and honicide, as an example.
It’s a great example of why we don’t allow victims, or relatives of victims, to or Jesus their own justice. Because they don’t care about distinctions that we, as a society, have decided are important.
Re:We Can't Just Assume that Facebook Will Do Its Best
by gotocake on Saturday January 26, 2019 @03:27PM
(#19008267)
This argument would call for an end to the distinction between manslaughter and honicide, as an example.
Corporations should probably not enjoy that distinction in the same way that people do. The sooner we dispense with the harmful fiction of corporate personhood the better. Either way, let’s not conflate people and the law, with corporations and the law.
Yes there is, if they failed to thoroughly consider the consequences of their actions, then we would call it negligence.
In law this is called "mens rea", or "guilty mind", and it exists in a hierarchy: Accidental, Negligent, Reckless, Knowingly, Intentionally, and we punish people differently based on which level of guilt they have.
There's another axis that courts consider when deciding charges and sentences called "actus reus", or "guilty act", and it's supposed to be represent how responsible the person is for the harm rendered. This also exists in a spectrum, from "proximate cause" (you did the thing that immediately caused the harm) to "coincidence", (you stabbed a voodoo doll, and the person got hurt, with no chain of causality linking the two events)
I would argue that Facebook engineers were negligent with respect to, like, the fake news fiasco, though probably not very responsible, being enablers rather than actors. Same with the racial loan targeting scandal.
The depression experiment, I would call reckless and a proximate cause of whatever harm was done. There is no way in hell that a secret experiment to make people depressed by manipulating their news feeds would pass an IRB, and Facebook should have been punished for it.