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Can anyone explain the logic of social media companies being held responsible for sextortion or cyberbullying?
I mean, I just want to give an example.
In the past, people would obviously use phones to call people, to threaten them, blackmail them, and so on, and there were obviously negative effects, but no-one ever said that the phone companies should be held responsible. So why is there this wave now against social media companies, that are expected to police speech (depending on country/location), and then also prevent or be held responsible for a host of negative effects of modern communication, such as blackmail, bullying, and other things.
I just don't understand the logic of it, so I was wondering if anyone had a great argument for why this is occuring.
Just recently read about lawsuits because of sextortion for example, in those cases the victim willingly bared themselves and sent pictures to the other person, that then blackmailed them, I just don't understand how that it Metas fault.
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8 Replies
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Almost as insane as gun manufactures being blamed/liable in death or injury. Like hating on spoons because they can make you fat. It’s a crazy world.
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I agree. Just weak people who like to play the victim and not take any responsibility.
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A lot of companies don’t like the fact that social media is used to document things that most people thought they were alone in experiencing that are actually widespread, like certain types of workplace or landlord abuses or things like that. People use social media to organize boycotts and raise awareness of labor market issues. It’s also something outside of the control of a lot of people who were traditionally in power because they ran “regular media” so they make up stupid reasons to hold companies responsible for things like this in retaliation.
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There is an astonishing amount of lack of responsibility in our world, but be clear, them targeting big companies is ALL about the money.
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I’m not familiar with the sextortion case, but I do have a general answer.
Firstly, unlike the phone analogy, social media is not just one-to-one communication. It is one-to-many.
If a news outlet published hate speech or bullying or some other criminal activity in its paper or on TV, that outlet would also have repercussions as well as the individual. Just like if I were given an official spot in a town square and used it to shout libel all day, the town then bears some of the responsibility for giving me that platform. The same holds true of social media.
Secondly, working in a digital space where the social channel itself controls much of where and how public content is shown (eg. the algorithm) they do hold specific responsibility for what a person might see.
This is why their capability is important. Facebook can’t necessarily stop one person starting to privately bully another. But they can allow users to be blocked, stopping it from continuing. They can provide data to authorities if it turns into a criminal case. They can support identifying the material shared over their platform. If they were able to know that a pedo ring were operating and swapping pictures, but did nothing about it, they would be held partially liable for supporting it.
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I looked it up and it looks like there are two different ppl suing because they lost someone to suicide and Facebook did not give them the information needed.
They recently shut down a ring of tens of thousands of accounts because they were participating in a Sextortion ring.
According to the article I’m SC they claim that IG causes users to scroll mindlessly and keep them hooked because of the algorithm.
Idk if I agree with the last one.
But if they should have noticed that many accounts participate in something that exploits children, they have a responsibility to protect teens and kids.
There are a bunch of tools they could put in place to prevent it. They knew it was happening.
Anyway thats what I got from the couple articles I read.
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very good information ……good to know about this important topic….
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