Advertising sends a message to groups of people.
Roads allow people to travel by car.
Roads are being uses to bring people to places where murders happen. You can't pretend that roads have no role.
So many things had a role.. power, internet, the company who made the computer they used, teachers, friends (or lack of), parents.. why decidd that social media or ads is the problem.
Social media has reduced the number of cults.
We can always replace words in other peoples’ statements to make them sound silly, but I’ll roll with it.
What if these roads provided, as part of the government’s offering, rest stops and gathering points exclusively for murderers? — Just like how a social network allows problematic groups people to gather and enable them.
What if certain schools accepted money from anyone and in exchange taught kids any curriculum, including murder? — Just how some services bombard people with outright lies, because special interests pay them to.
If your service has a massive reach and influence you can’t just say “nope, we don’t do politics”. It’s simply not honest.
What similar controls do we have for social media? An institutionalised system for silencing people which is euphemistically called “suspending users reported for harassment” which is just a formalised lynch mob.
They built these services. They are, ate least in part, responsible for how they work and the consequences of what they built. The content they’re serving and data has a meaning to us.
You can’t pretend that a social network doesn’t have a role in bringing anti-vaxxers together and enabling them to organize.
You can’t pretend that an advertising platform doesn’t have a role in distributing misleading information by business or other interests.
> If these users are breaking laws...
Laws aren’t the ultimate arbiter of everything. There’s a reason they change and evolve over time. Personal responsibility is not a law, yet we expect everyone to have some.