They could display a warning on every goddamn person's Facebook going "No, the Adam/Ryan Lanza here is NOT the killer on the news, please leave them alone."
What’s Facebook’s responsibility when the nation seeks to lynch someone?
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Re: What’s Facebook’s responsibility when the nation seeks to lynch someone?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
None. The news agencies claim it came from the police, who had been confused. There was no malicious intent, no gross negligence, and he is a limited public figure no matter if he was the shooter or the brother of the shooter
Well, no, because he was actually neither the shooter nor the brother of the shooter, so he is unlikely to be found a limited public figure. Plus, pegging him as such without doing even the most basic research seems like negligence to me (any reasonably prudent person would have taken 15 fucking seconds to look harder at his profile) Otherwise, your assessment would be correct.
All other news reports seem to indicate that this Facebook-Ryan is the brother of the killer.
Re: What’s Facebook’s responsibility when the nation seeks to lynch someone?
#73Facebook have a responsibility, insofar as privacy is concerned: users are now forced to be included in searches; how easy is it to make your posts saying your are not the killer; how easy is it to delete your Facebook profile, as the wrongly accused brother eventually did?
What's more important is that other people like the Ryan Lanza namesakes are affected by this erosion of privacy - people who also face threats and the like.
It doesn't make them culpable, but they should know that they have a responsibility, because when people are on the look-out for someone, they are going to choose the path of least resistance to tracking them down.
For what it's worth, how should Twitter go about it, when a Ryan Lanza receives death threats from people on Twitter? What can be really complicated is figuring out how to deal with the problem; what isn't is understanding that the proprietors of the most popular social media platforms have a responsibility to their users.
Re: What’s Facebook’s responsibility when the nation seeks to lynch someone?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean well when I say this but I think it needs to be said. My Bayesian probability sense is tingling. HN is comparatively small compared to the space of people-who-could-be-Ryan's-roommate.
Well, there's probably nothing sensible that I could do to prove who I am. I promise that making the hashtag trend wont blow up the world.
And there's something of an irony.
I'm glad to see that rational distinction prevails in this smaller forum. It's difficult to derive an as useful moderator as yours is here to the much larger colosseum of Facebook.
Anyone can be a deputy on Facebook. If it was the physical world and someone put up a notice in a meeting place inviting a hundred people to come and trash a citizens home, or where a lynch mob gathered under that roof to engage in hysterical damaging acts against a citizen protected ordinarily by law, we would not say that the owner of the meeting place did not at least have a duty of care.
It would be an impossible contradiction to require the venue owner to install fire exit signs to protect an individual and yet allow no interference if the individual is set alight inside the building instead.
Maybe Facebook is a bit like a nightclub. Go and have a good time and no one should get in your face while you're partying. Just don't expect that you won't get in a bar fight once in a while. And if it gets too messy, management will throw you out.
Re: What’s Facebook’s responsibility when the nation seeks to lynch someone?
#75Maybe the edge case of being misidentified as your brother, the mass murderer, is not one that Facebook needs to spend any time solving.
And perhaps, despite some of the comments in this thread, strong traditions and protections for free speech are broadly valuable, and it wouldn't make sense for there to be litigious or legislative remedies that weaken them.
And if we're going to waste time worrying about people expressing their "hate" on Facebook, perhaps we could also solve the problem of pandodaily linkbaiting a "tech" article out of a national tragedy involving the slaughter of children.
Re: What’s Facebook’s responsibility when the nation seeks to lynch someone?
#76Maybe the edge case of being misidentified as your brother, the mass murderer, is not one that Facebook needs to spend any time solving. And perhaps, despite some of the comments in this thread, strong traditions and protections for free speech are broadly valuable, and it wouldn't make sense for there to be litigious or legislative remedies that weaken them. And if we're going to waste time worrying about people exp…
No one is seeking to take away freedom of speech. Only to protect the rights of the accused.
For a more complete elaboration of the difference...
please refer to "To Kill a Mockingbird". A book you can find on Amazon. The author is Harper Lee.
Re: What’s Facebook’s responsibility when the nation seeks to lynch someone?
#77The responsibility is not Facebook's, but rather the news organizations that reported early rumors and reports as facts. IANAL, but i would expect that they potentially face libel suits for defamation of character. In this situation, Facebook is merely a modern day phone book (albeit vastly more robust and complex). It is the news organization that bears the responsibility of gathering, checking and publishing verifi…
How could facebook respond to this anyway? Do they scour all news for incorrectly attributed stories with facebook links? That would be impossible.
Facebook has the ability to look for trends and spikes in activity. If fb start seeing lots of new pages and groups springing up called "$name is a killer" then you can know something is going on
Re: What’s Facebook’s responsibility when the nation seeks to lynch someone?
#78This is why Dutch publishers are prohibited to publish last names of suspects (even after conviction). In this case it would be abbreviated to "Adam L.". They even protect the identities of the most notorious killers and terrorists (Volkert van der G., Karst T., Samir A.). The US should do the same, solves a lot of problems outlined in this article.
You'd run into quite a bit of trouble with the first amendment and freedom of the press.
Sounds like a bug in how the first amendment is written and interpreted, you should fix that.
Re: What’s Facebook’s responsibility when the nation seeks to lynch someone?
#79I think it's examples like this that show the extreme interpretation of the US free speech law. The US doesn't protect all speech and allows some things to be banned. Cases like this should fall under nonprotected speech. The harm that can done time innocent person without any due process of a fair legal trial and with no effective ability to argue your case far outweighs the harm to a newspaper in banning them mentioning the name. You should be allowed report all the rest of the details of this horrific crime, of course, but you should not be legally allowed to identify the accused unless it was very much in the public interest (e.g. if it was a politician who did it).
Re: What’s Facebook’s responsibility when the nation seeks to lynch someone?
#80The responsibility is not Facebook's, but rather the news organizations that reported early rumors and reports as facts. IANAL, but i would expect that they potentially face libel suits for defamation of character. In this situation, Facebook is merely a modern day phone book (albeit vastly more robust and complex). It is the news organization that bears the responsibility of gathering, checking and publishing verifi…
The responsibility is not Facebook's
I agree that Facebook has no legal responsibility here, but the responsibilities they have willingly to take on in the past does create an level of expectations in the userbase. The userbase is completely within their rights to try and exert social pressure on facebook.
If Facebook chooses to actively prohibit adult content being shared between two adults, and monitors the content of private chat conversations, why shouldn't it remove this type of content when it comes to their attention? Is it unreasonable for users to expect them to do that?