Class-action suit filed against Meta for facilitating Rohingya Genocide [pdf]

It's not an analogy, it's just a literal truth. HN has an algorithm (of far less complexity than Facebook's) for determining what shows up at the top of the news page and the comments on a topic.

A possible question of interest, were this lawsuit to find Facebook guilty, is "If someone somehow gamed HN's algorithm (which is relatively simple, so would in practice be pretty easy to game) to encourage a genocide, should HN be liable?" How complicated the algorithm is likely does not enter into the reasoning for culpability.

So I think there's two big differences.

1. Most people use facebook to keep track of their friends and family rather than email these days. Part of it is that you can announce the new baby in the family and it goes to everyone. But the FB algorithm decides what you view. So the most engaging a post is, the more likely it will show up in your feed.

The problem is that not all posts go to everyone, and if you actually want to see what's happening with Uncle Ed's cancer treatment, you have to physically go to his facebook page. Why? See point #2:

2. There was a time before Twitter/FB where ads paid for the server the forum was on. Social media realized that "targeted engagement" could be profitable. So by tweaking their algorithms to keep people on the platform, they would make more in ad revenue as they can sell more ads.

Of course this led to stories where good friends had died a year ago, and the facebook algorithm "neglected" to prioritize it on feeds, because it wasn't as engaging as the Bills/Jets game the day before.