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A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide

cnn.com

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Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide

#81

Post by wharvle »

cybrox wrote: post #34
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #4

I think the bad guy extortionist should be held accountable but if Instagram cannot identify them then Instagram should be held accountable. These platforms need more traceability. If Instagram were liable for anon bad actors illegal behavior then Instagram would clean up their act with a quickness. There is no incentive to fix anything on these platforms with the current rules.

I see where this is coming from but making platforms fully liable for user content will make it impossible to start a business that includes (semi-) public user interaction at all. Only FAANG-size companies will be able to afford the legal fees attached to that idea.

Step 1: Make platforms liable—in civil and criminal senses—for content they elect to promote (not just host). "Elect" includes "an algorithm did it". This also includes things like "an algorithm said we should put this ad, which no human at our company has even looked at, in front of this particular person".

There is no step 2. The worst parts of social media and ad clearinghouses (Jesus, all the scams Google promotes and makes money off of) are destroyed, anything remotely defensible survives. Personalized "algo" feeds and "algo" suggestions? Untenable. Customized ads served from a system no human monitors or checks to make sure they're not serving blatant scams at a massive scale? Gone. Both the incentives and ability to try to connect strangers with one another in ways they didn't directly ask for? Greatly diminished.

Ad-supported media survives (for better or worse). People can still communicate just fine. People can still publish without trouble.

Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide

#82

Post by jmclnx »

>But Guffey says he believes that Meta and other social media companies are not being held accountable

100% true.

Very sad to hear and I hope he wins. But these companies are very powerful so I doubt things will change. A blatant is what Apple did in the EU after they lost their court case.

Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide

#83

Post by curtis3389 »

glorygut123 wrote: post #69

Surely the real problem here, to my non-American eyes, is having easy access to a firearm, no?

It is certainly part of the problem, but it's not the root cause.

Yes. Access to and knowledge of firearms dramatically increases the lethality of suicide attempts.

But in this case, the kid was scammed for nudes and then blackmailed with them. Without easy access to guns, he could have survived the suicide attempt, but there's no guarantee.

The root cause has more to do with childhood, internet access, and maybe even parent-child relationships.

Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide

#84

Post by Barrin92 »

annexrichmond wrote: post #5

> After his death, the scammers sent Guffey a laughing face emoji and a message using a pseudo account on Instagram after the original one was shut down. “It said, ‘did I tell you your son begged for his life?’” Guffey says. They also demanded money in exchange for the photos. I wish there was a special prison for these types of people. Jesus Christ.

>using a pseudo account

points to one of the major issues around this. Why are these even possible? Instagram is a social network for real people. Implement a strong form of ID verification. Charge people a dollar for a sign up. Sure there'll still be edge cases of people using stolen creds but it cuts down what, 99.9% of scam? The kid in the article was extorted for 25$. Drive the cost of this crap up.

Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide

#85

Post by whitakerch »

When things like this happen I always think that the more important problem is the fact that he chose suicide. This sort of thing cannot be gotten rid of entirely. It's impossible. They can always be lured into another messaging system that doesn't track or analyze data at all.

I know this would be extremely embarrassing but it is far from life destroying (or at least it should be). Within a year life would've moved on and no one would even care. We all need to better come to terms with this reality and neutralize its impact and the shame of it.

Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide

#86

Post by BadHumans »

“If I have a party on my property, and I invite everybody on there, I’m responsible for what happens on my property,” Guffey told CNN. “And for some reason, we treat these digital companies different. These companies hide behind section 230 and say they’re not responsible.”

There is a middle ground. If you are just a platform or software, then I don't think you should be liable. I don't think Discourse should be liable for every forum they host. But, when you are in the position of someone like Meta that exist to generate "engagement" to push ads onto people then I think that should change a bit.

Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide

#87

Post by tmdyn »

glorygut123 wrote: post #69

Surely the real problem here, to my non-American eyes, is having easy access to a firearm, no?

To this American's eyes, not mentioning that at all is a glaring omission. I recognize they might not want to in the story of the representative's son (as it might come across as blaming the parents in a recent tragedy) but even though it's for sure relevant in the aggregate.

Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide

#88

Post by barcode_feeder »

jondwillis wrote: post #63
api wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are organized "boiler room" operations doing this to kids at scale. They'll trick a kid into sending nudes or even lie and claim to have them or use AI to generate them, then will try to get the kid to steal their parents' credit cards and send money. Today's dark forest hellscape Internet is not a safe place for young people, and it's getting worse with AI automation of scams and fraud. I wouldn't even post pi…

Do you have any links detailing these kinds of boiler rooms?

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/17/world/asia/my...

This has a different victim demographic but is broadly similar and was a good read (at least as far as I remember)

Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide

#89

Post by elevatedastalt »

BadHumans wrote: post #86

“If I have a party on my property, and I invite everybody on there, I’m responsible for what happens on my property,” Guffey told CNN. “And for some reason, we treat these digital companies different. These companies hide behind section 230 and say they’re not responsible.” There is a middle ground. If you are just a platform or software, then I don't think you should be liable. I don't think Discourse should be liab…

“If I have a party on my property, and I invite everybody on there, I’m responsible for what happens on my property,”

I have no specific comment on the actual situation here, but I feel this expectation is also ridiculous, so the analogy doesn't work for me. People shouldn't be responsible for anything that happens on their plot of land if they have no actual hand in it.

Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide

#90

Post by nindalf »

blueyes wrote: post #7

It's would be trivially easy to scan these streams of messages through some kind of ML classifier and identify cases of extortion before they result in suicide. Once the platforms identify the perps, they can block them from the platform. I hope this lawsuit makes the costs of platform inaction so high that they build out detection systems.

This already exists. There are classifiers for Scams, Sextortion and other crimes. Like with all interventions, recall isn't perfect.
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