Submitted 1 year ago by Anonymau5@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://fortune.com/2023/08/16/youtube-reddit-buffalo-shooting-lawsuit/
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/3320637
YouTube and Reddit are sued for allegedly enabling the racist mass shooting in Buffalo that left 10 dead::The complementary lawsuits claim that the massacre in 2022 was made possible by tech giants, a local gun shop, and the gunman’s parents.
This is so so stupid. We should also sue the ISPs then, they enabled the use of YouTube and Reddit. And the phone provider for enabling communications. This is such a dangerous slippery slope to put any blame on the platforms.
I think the thing isn’t just providing access to the content, but using algorithms to promote how likely it is for deranged people to view more and more content that fuel their motives for hateful acts instead of trying to reduce how often that content is seen, all because they make more money if they watch more content, wether it is harmful or not.
This.
I don’t know about Reddit, but YouTube 100% drives engagement by feeding users increasingly flammable and hateful content.
Yeah, the difference is in whether or not the company is choosing what to put in front of a viewer’s eyes.
For the most part an ISP just shows people what they request. If someone gets bomb making directions from YouTube it would be insane to sue AT&T because AT&T delivered the appropriate packets when someone went to YouTube.
On the other end of the spectrum is something like Fox News. They hire every host, give them timeslots, have the opportunity to vet guests, accept advertising money to run against their content, and so on.
Section 512 of the DMCA treats “online service providers” like YouTube and Reddit as if they’re just ISPs, merely hosting content that is generated by users. OTOH, YouTube and Reddit use ML systems to decide what the users are shown. In the case of YouTube, the push to suggest content to users is pretty strong. You could argue they’re much closer to the Fox News side of things than to the ISP side these days. There’s no human making the decisions on what content should be shown, but does that matter?
Absolutely. I saw a Google ad the other day from maybe PragerU that was about climate change not being real, while I was searching for an old article that was more optimistic about outcomes. They actually said by the ad that they were showing it as a suggested thing, and thankfully you could report it, which I did immediately. It pissed me off a ton.
A friend recently shared a similar suggested video/ad they got on YouTube, which was saying “Ukrainians are terrorists”. PragerU or TPUSA.
I can see the argument for allowing these ads to exist as a freedom of speech thing, fine. But actively promoting these ads is very different. The lawsuit would have merits on this. I’d prefer if this content was actively minimized, but at the very least it shouldn’t be promoted.
What if it isn’t algorithms but upvotes? What if Lemmy is next?
If you were head of a psychiatric ward and had an employee you knew was telling patients “Boy, I sure wish someone would kill as many black people as they could”, you would absolutely share responsibility when on of them did exactly that.
If you were deliberately pairing that employee with patients who had shown violent behaviour on the basis of “they both seem to like violence”, you would absolutely share responsibility for that violence.
This isn’t a matter of “there’s just so much content, however can we check it all?”.
Reddit has hosted multiple extremist and dangerous communities, claiming “we’re just the platform!” while handing over the very predictable post histories of mass shooters week after week.
YouTube has built an algorithm and monetisation system that is deliberately designed to lure people down rabbit holes then done nothing to stop it luring people towards domestic terrorism.
It’s a lawsuit against companies worth billions. They’re not being executed. There are grounds to accuse them of knowingly profiting from the grooming of terrorists and if they want to prove that’s not the case, they can do it in court.
Do ISPs actively encourage you to watch extremist content? Do they push that content toward people who are at risk of radicalization to get extra money?
I think to blame/sue the company that is nearest to the user should work fine. (following is hyperbolical) If you don’t do it that way, then yes it would be slippery because the big bang would need to be sued. But that makes no sense.
So if an attack is planned via mail you think we should sue the postal service? The phone company if it’s done over the phone?
Utilities aren’t the same thing as platforms.
But giant media platforms run by giant tech corportations who have repeatwdly shown that they don’t give a shit about people? If they’re not putting railguards on their algorithm and content out of choice and are consequently creating mass murderers, then they should be regulated to have some railguards.
No corporation has proven that it will make the best choices for society, it’s up to people to force them to.
the isps don't encourage people to see content that makes them mad
Then what just give up hold Youtube account for their actions
This comment would have really benefitted from some punctuation
I agree that his parents are culpable.
I think the root of the problem is the Republican party. If you look at the language the shooter used in his manifesto, it’s very very similar. There are thing social media platforms can do it mitigate extremism, but people like this will continue to feel emboldened by the GOP.
Everytown Law is about to get a lesson on how Section 230 works.
Pretty sure SCOTUS has a case they’re hearing currently that may very well change the scope of section 230 so I’d maybe reserve your quips until after that shakes out lol
The two big cases this year were already decided: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter,_Inc._v._Taamneh and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzalez_v._Google_LLC
Although both dodged the S230 claims, both made it clear that Twitter and Google, respectively, had no liability.
Is there another case I missed?
Ah, to be based on selective history and tradition.
Big tech says no.
This isn’t the first time they’ve forgotten how various laws work. And they keep losing. Kinda makes you wonder if it’s intentional or not.
They should be suing the Conservative Party. That’s the enabler of gun violence.
hm yes, let’s look at who commits the most gun violence in the US, surely it is conservatives!
“The conservative party enables gun violence” and “conservatives commit the most gun violence” are completely separate and independent statements. The person you’re replying to is saying the former, not the latter.
In other words, they aren’t saying that Republicans commit the majority of gun violence, but that the policies championed and implemented by Republicans are responsible for gun violence occurring.
And whether or not Republicans like it, they admit this all the time, although not the way you’d think. The GOP likes to say that mental health is the driver of gun violence and mass shootings, but simultaneously, the GOP votes against improved mental healthcare and even slashes funding for it.
Quit being obtuse. You know as well as I do that conservatives ENABLE the gun violence we see every day. It’s baked right into the bullshit policy they enact, the laws they block, and the gun manufacturers that pay them their salaries.
I challenge you to be more ignorant. Please. I want to see if it’s possible.
If youtube is still pushing racist and alt right content on to people, then they can get fucked. Why should we let some recommender system controlled by a private corporation have this much influence American culture and politics??
I sub to primarily leftist content and their YouTube shorts algorithm insists on recommending the most vile far right content on the planet.
I primarily watch woodworking or baking content on Youtube. I feel like the far right content is super prevalent with Shorts. I’ll watch something like a quick tool review, and the next video will be someone asking folks on the street if it’s ok to be white. What color you are isn’t your decision, but what you do every day is, and being some dumbass white kid accosting black tourists in Times Square for shitty reaction content is just gross.
It doesn’t matter how often I say I dislike the content, block channels or whatever, Youtube has just decided it’s going to check in from time to time and see if I want to let loose my inner Boomer and rage with Rogan.
It could be that pushing videos on the other side of the political spectrum gets interactions in the form of people sharing/commenting on it. Even if you disagree, going “Why does YouTube recommend this, this is awful” is still a share.
The algorithm prioritises interactions above all else, and fewer things get people interacting more than being wrong, or them disagreeing vehemently.
This is happening on my FB video feed. I watch a funny chick called Charlotte Dobre and she does funny reaction videos. I honestly love her, but all my algorithm shows me for recommendations are these cop brutality videos with comments praising the cops, and right wing crap that praises Abbotts wall and desantis dictatorship. It drives me nuts, and no matter howany pages I block I always get more right wing recommended crap videos
I literally only get Marvel Snap/general gaming, College Humor, tech, educational, stand up comedy, and drones. That’s it. I don’t mean to victim blame, but it learns what you click and what you stay to watch.
Wow I am so surprised by this. I watch mainly tech and gardening YouTube and my shorts have been extremely applicable to me.
Even when I use a new computer like at work the shorts are mostly pop culture.
I wonder if this differs from country to country? Or is it different in Europe vs US? I get maths, engineering, music. Nothing too awful. But there is clearly a fully conscious and malicious push to the right going on on all large platforms. It seems Europe is trying to step in and limit that shit from big US platforms before it’s too late. Then we have censorship looming on the other side of the picture.
I’m in UK and I often get YouTube shorts made by/for US alt right. These include Ben Shapiro, Tucker, Tate and Jordan Peterson - also people complaining about Bud Light. I always dislike this content and alot of the Tate stuff needs reporting.
I’m left wing and very rarely get left wing content. I don’t remember ever being shown any extreme left wing content.
The left wing UK content I get is MPs is Westminster’s making speeches, the UK right wing content is manufactured publicity made by the Tories.
Additionally being in Scotland and liking music seems to cause Google to serve you YouTube shorts of Scottish marching bands. Google doesn’t seem to realise flute (not traditional bagpipe/kilt bands) in Scotland are mostly hate groups. These orange bands are the group that became the KKK in America. They just aren’t recognised as a hate group in the UK because they support monarchy, unionism and are actively courted/involved with both Tories and Labour. Despite playing music encouraging the death of other religious groups and using their marches as intimidation.
I recently started to get a few right wing channels starting to show up but I’m promptly clicked not interested and blocked them with a Firefox extension
If you ever go on YouTube not logged into your account (or in a provate browser), the default stuff on the homepage are: one lo-fi stream, Mr. Beast latest video, and the rest is all right wing feaemonger stuff.
Oooh be careful or you’re gonna get the Free Speech Absolutist liberals mad at you. Instead of blocking the offensive content, you just need to “win them over with better ideas.”
If you look at anything even remotely related to “men’s interests” YouTube will begin showing you alt right fascist bull shit.
Seriously. I spend a little too much time watching a short that is clearly designed to get me worked up about stereotypical communication difficulties between men & women from a “women, am I rite?” perspective, suddenly I’m getting Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan. I spend a little too much time watching a video about certain Ukrainian war equipment or a Slo Mo Guys video involving guns (wood stock hunting guns, I felt like it was the early 80s all over again before everyone decided they needed assault weapons), suddenly I’m getting served tacticool idiots with kitted-out murder machines. Or I watch a Bart Erhman video (secular New Testament scholar with a large lay audience) and suddenly I get served muslim da’wah/apologetics videos and Catholic catechism ads.
Lots of stupid, emotionally driven teenagers on the platform who think their opinion is reality, so you have a lot of Tate/Peterson/Rogan riders on the platform. Add in the fact ‘controversial’ (blatantly wrong or insane) content gets lots of comments/engagement, so it is pushed by the algorithm. Then there are just lots of idiots in general who don’t want to consider self-reflection or change their vies, so they will eat up all the ideology that shifts the blame or gives them a chance to ‘get to the top.’ They are victims of modern society. But somehow see every ‘problem’ except for the real one, the one of neoliberal ideologies around capitalism and individualism.
If you look at anything even remotely related to “men’s interests” YouTube will begin showing you alt right fascist bull shit.
Or if you don’t. Youtube shorts recommends Rogan constantly.
I watch a lot of model trains stuff, I don’t get alt-right fascist stuff. At worst I get shit like ShoeOnHead who seems reasonable enough.
She is an anti-feminist and basically alt right entry point.
They should sue Facebook too. Facebook is rife with Nazis. And they’re fine with it.
Considering the Facebook algorithm will introduce you to neo-nazis, that would actually make sense.
Facebook says this guy’s face is fine: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100086229708504&a…
Have the been any legal cases on these algorithms?
You have klan members in Congress, supreme court, churches and every police department, but sure, YT and Reddit is the problem.
Reddit, youtube, and tiktok are quickly becoming the new, “video games cause violence” cry from conservatives. Hell you see people here claiming tiktok is going to make all the kids have 2 second attention spans. It’s all just scapegoats for other systematic failures in culture, education, and social saftey nets, but those are hard to fix. Easier to just blame the platform and not make any real changes.
There can be two problems.
At the very least, they shouldn’t be promoting this content. There’s a difference between hosting content and actively suggesting it to users.
Good. Civil court is where they’re most vulnerable, this is called tort law.
In criminal cases, the defendant is innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury of their peers. In a civil lawsuit, the defendant is only innocent until a judge thinks they’re 51% likely to be guilty, what they call the preponderance of evidence.
In other words, “probably” is good enough when you sue someone. This makes it more efficient to process the 99% of civil court cases, which are just dumb shit like which of these two arguing neighbors needs to pay for having a tree on their property line cut down or something. It also results in our civil system being a very effective weapon though, as a lot of wealthier and more powerful people know pretty well.
I don't really know why you emphasized judge. Jury trials are very common in civil cases. This will be a pretrial dismissal or summary judgement without a jury, however. There's nothing to discover or evidence to review that's contested.
Feels good to be reading this somewhere other than reddit
I mean lookingbat the details for the basis of the suit. They think they can sue someone for teaching a criminal how to do something. They think they can sue the makers of body armor for selling a guy who was not a criminal at the time of purchase, an unregulated commercial product. They think they can sue YouTube for providing motive for whatever he did.
In the law world theres a word for this. Its called a shakedown. This is grieving family’s who are vindictive. They dont care who pays, but somebody has to pay in their eyes. Sadly on the merits this case will die in court pretty fast and nobody is gonna see a dollar unless alphabet and spez’s lawyers decide they are feeling charitable. Which they won’t because settling would cause implications of guilt in the public eye.
This is grieving family’s who are vindictive.
I’d blame it on the lawyers.
They dont care who pays, but somebody has to pay in their eyes. Sadly on the merits this case will die in court pretty fast and nobody is gonna see a dollar
The family’s lawyer is getting paid either way.
sadly… this case will die in court
Only part I disagree with. It’s a very good thing that this case dies in court. It really does suck for the families, sure, but if these kinds of lawsuits worked it would cause a whole lot more problems than it solves.
nailed it
A former Australian PM recently won a case against Google arguing that the YouTube platform enabled journalist FriendlyJordies to make fun of him, and he won a $750 million settlement.
They blamed books for copy cat killers, movies and video games for shootings now they want to blame websites…
now they are trying to sue people because of hindsight? this isn’t Minority Report. this is ‘lets throw allot of torts and other legal bs on the wall and pray something sticks’
🤔 so if gun violence is a problem… and they’ve already banned violence… what if one would ban the other thing - oh wait no it’s definitely the goofy gamer machinimas 🤭 stop giggling y’all, this is serious. you don’t wanna turn into criminals
The gun(s) are the most significant enablers of mass shootings.
Will be dismissed on section 230 grounds.
Reddit enables more than just racist, it's a nasty cesspool the like of 4chan, riddled with bots, the CEO himself is a POS.
I feel like our problem isn’t that social media companies are not liable but that they are too big, like imagine this happening on mastodon. Generally I feel like mastodon would not allow this unless the instance was specificlly facist like the KF instance
Stop blaming websites for crazy people doing crazy things.
When the Joker movie came out in 2019, everyone on CNN was saying it was going to cause mass shootings, because of that one lunatic that shot up a movie theater during a screening of “the dark knight”
The idiots who write the material for the talking heads just want to stir things up so they can get eyeballs on the screen.
I bet the outlets that were giving live coverage of the shooting showed ads every 5 minutes…like they did with that one really bad shooting.
Much as I dislike Reddit, I dont think they are to blame here
Everyone was responsible except the shooter. Welcome to Lawyer World.
It’s weird that this is a link to a 25 day old post on the same community.
Blame everything but the shooter great
This is the best summary I could come up with:
YouTube, Reddit and a body armor manufacturer were among the businesses that helped enable the gunman who killed 10 Black people in a racist attack at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket, according to a pair of lawsuits announced Wednesday.
The complementary lawsuits filed by Everytown Law in state court in Buffalo claim that the massacre at Tops supermarket in May 2022 was made possible by a host of companies and individuals, from tech giants to a local gun shop to the gunman’s parents.
The lawsuit claims Mean LLC manufactured an easily removable gun lock, offering a way to circumvent New York laws prohibiting assault weapons and large-capacity magazines.
YouTube, named with parent companies Alphabet Inc. and Google, is accused of contributing to the gunman’s radicalization and helping him acquire information to plan the attack.
“We aim to change the corporate and individual calculus so that every company and every parent recognizes they have a role to play in preventing future gun violence,” said Eric Tirschwell, executive director of Everytown Law.
Last month, victims’ relatives filed a lawsuit claiming tech and social media giants such as Facebook, Amazon and Google bear responsibility for radicalizing Gendron.
The original article contains 592 words, the summary contains 192 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Or, I don’t know, ban guns.
This lawsuite is ridiculous. You should hold the shooter liable for there actions. Not reddit, the gun shop or anyone else.
Riiight blame youtube and reddit. First music then videogames now youtube and reddit?
I am all for this
tech giants, a local gun shop, and the gunman’s parents.
Can’t help but feel like the last two have the lions share of the responsibility here… Especially the last one. If your kid goes on a killing spree, you did a fucking shit job of parenting.
I'll post this link.
We all know that there's horrible, racist shit on youtube. But it seems like you have to actively search for it before it's offered as a recommendation.
HawlSera@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Youtube needs to be punished for their hypocrisy.
Average Joe gets a community guidelines strike for “promoting violence” because he said “Dead” instead of “Unalived”, but Penis Prager can advocate for beating your gay kids till they turn straight and YouTube just throws it into everyone’s playlists without so much as a “Boys will be boys”
theangryseal@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Who is going to punish them? The leaders who agree with Prager that you can beat the gay out of your kids aren’t gonna get behind that.
A significant portion of our population is hoping for a way to degay their kids.
Man, I’m gonna be all doom and gloom when I go back to bed here in a few.
For me, it seems hopeless. We’ll all be further radicalized by the thing that I thought for most of my life would bring salvation, our access to the Library of Shitexander. A big old library filled with information, Ricky. Information on the workings of electricity. Information on the life and work of Isaac Newton. Information on how to cannibalize your neighbor. Information on how some grifter talks to god and knows exactly what he wants. We can learn useful skills like, how to hate black people and why we should. We can learn how to kickoff Armageddon, and why nuclear weapons are biblical and mutually assured destruction isn’t only a good thing, it’s what we should strive for.
And because we humans create information, we have arguments about who should decide what kind of information is available. Free speech absolutists will say that anything goes and is fair game. Others will say that some speech is dangerous because it influences hatred and bigotry. Each group has representation and has to compromise in order to keep things from escalating, oh but compromise might escalate things too.
Our species was born from chaos looking for a leader who didn’t exist.
I’m just gonna ride the rock until I’m not riding it any more and hope the people of the future don’t destroy each other and can someday figure out that that god ain’t coming back. What else can we do?
You guys have a good morning. I’m heading back to bed.
Ktheone@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Jesus dude, you gave me an existential crisis.
spiderjuzce@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
When I was radicalized I learned how to ride my bike with no handlebars
anarchy79@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Personally I think everybody should shut the fuck up permanently.
AndreTelevise@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I see you’re a person of culture as well…
anarchy79@lemmy.world 1 year ago
There is a good reason for that, and that is that Penis Prager is a bigger payoff for Google.
HawlSera@lemm.ee 1 year ago
yeah but the hypocrisy is so blatant