This seems kind of silly. Should radio equipment manufacturers be liable for the Rwandan genocide? I'm not fan of Facebook (I don't even have an account) but requiring them to fulfill a function that the Burmese government didn't do seems shortsighted.
Radio equipment manufacturers don't specifically amplify messages that incite outrage, and also don't perform mass psychological experiments on their users [1].
And there's a difference between something like a forum that moderates versus what Facebook's algorithm is doing -- one is reactive to its users (and generally reacting based on what other users believe is inappropriate conduct), while the algorithm is proactive in pushing content to users.
If they can not fulfill that, then they should offer their service in such countries, or at the very least stop doing it once they became aware of the issue.
Yeah but Facebook is eager to take on the moderator role. They would have been much smarter to, like a radio provider or telco say: "we are just the pipeline, we are happy to follow all court orders but we aren't moderating past that", but now that they have actively embraced these kind of moderator roles they've lost the ability to make that claim.
That’s a great point, and one can argue that there are lower hanging fruit with respect to this hill they’ve chose to die on. Lots of inconclusive stuff got moderated down about Covid (origins, vaccine discussions, masks, so on) by both YouTube and Facebook. It feels like that’s a way easier case to win initially than proving genocide.
Facebook moderates content heavily because that's what advertisers want. The major ad buyers don't want their ads to show up next to anything highly offensive. So no, from a profit standpoint it wouldn't be smarter to stop moderating.
Yes, we understand the incentives. My kids want to stay up past their bedtime, but I still say no because of the consequences the next day. I'm sure you agree that simply because someone wants you to do something it has no bearing on whether it was the correct choice or not.
What if the radio equipment had algorithms that spied on your communication and used that information to help you find people and groups that facilitated genocide?
When you use our special transmitters and your listeners use our special headphones, then the headphones will send an encoded signal saying their owner is more liable to be affected by broadcasts urging genocide! This allows you to use the differential broadcasting properties of our transmitter to send special commit genocide now messages to genocide ready users of our headphones while continuing to send innocuous look at this cute bunny pictures to people who will soon be killed!
Buy now, operators are standing by.
on edit: I guess it should be innocuous renditions of The Little Drummer boy to stick to the analogy, but I was momentarily taken by the little bunny idea.
Starting to wonder if the name became "Meta" so that the headlines wouldn't read "Class action suit filed against Facebook" or "Scandal involving Facebook".
There used to be some telecom company in my country, who had some TV personality in all of their TV ads. Then, one day he wasn't in the ads anymore. It had been said that they stopped putting him in the ads, because the audience tends to associate negative emotions with a person more easily than with abstract concepts.
Perhaps something similar is going on with some of these tech companies, where they use some really abstract name to which it's hard to attach negative emotions to.
How effective can such a thing be? Aren't they using the Meta keyword on all of their products now? As well as the fact it was likely all over the news, globally.
Mark Zuckerberg is the head of the world's most mundane tech company at the moment, so he changed the name and the focus of the company to try and dig out of this hole.
Not gonna lie, I always thought slightly worse of Facebook just because of the name. Not on purpose, it just seemed a silly name for such a large company. It's like if Toys "R" Us somehow became a powerhouse of a company you heard about all the time.
It probably says more about me and my perceptions of social networks than anything else, and my perceptions of Facebook from the early days persisting with the name. But that's the thing with names, they don't matter. Except they actually do a little bit.
It actually took me a while to realize this, but some areas use the term 'facebook' (before the website was around), as a term similar in meaning to what most of us call a "yearbook"
Why should we send American kids to die in Burma? To look tough? To redeem the “western world”? What happens after? Are we really liberating Burma for its own purpose, or just establishing American military bases in close proximity to China?
It’s these kinds of neo-colonialist urges that got us into the messes in Afghanistan and Iraq. We (the US in particular but also NATO as a whole) need to stop running around the world pretending we know the solution to everyone’s problems. Sometimes you have to let the local populations work it out themselves, and accept that China is a more natural ally for many countries in SE Asia.
Yes, if enemies think you are not tough, you get intimidated, humiliated, and then ultimately attacked.
> To redeem the “western world”?
Yes, to reverse the 20 years of disgrace, and regain the mandate of righteousness. Without righteousness, you can't do anything well as a united Western bloc — a raison d'etre for the entire post-war Western political system.
From my vantage point, the wars the US gets into are solely designed to grind young American lives into windfall profits for a defense industry that prioritizes contract value over mission goals. Which is why we had no definition of success in either place.
There is no righteousness on the world stage, only exploitation. The US has simply put itself ahead of its allies too many times for the world to trust us anymore.
I'm going to be very generous and your phrasing which sounds like you mean the US should commit ethnic cleansing.
I guess you mean the US should invade, occupy the country, impose new laws and police them. I guess you believe this because that has gone so well in the past.
Which means nothing remaining standing of the fixed infrastructure of Burmese army, and nothing moving remaining of its vehicles.
Burma has a strong, nation-wide oppositionary movement, which is now trampled by an even more powerful, and cutthroat Burmese army.
Without two things aforementioned, the balance will change. An aid of small arms supplies will be enough for the opposition to win, and unite the country.
It's only now, a once in 100 years opportunity came — to stop warring ethnic armies killing each other, in face of a common enemy with the Burmese ethnic majority.
> Burma has a strong, nation-wide oppositionary movement, which is now trampled by an even more powerful, and cutthroat Burmese army.
>Without two things aforementioned, the balance will change. An aid of small arms supplies will be enough for the opposition to win, and unite the country.
This sounds a lot like what I remember hearing about the Iraq invasion, how we would be hailed as liberators.
> This sounds a lot like what I remember hearing about the Iraq invasion, how we would be hailed as liberators.
We were, and then the whitehouse had to completely waste all of this goodwill, install Allawi, oust Allawi, fire up the whole Sunni-Shia thing, and then install Maliki as a counter.
Sure, and then how long do we leave troops there for? another 20 years and then we leave and everything goes back to the way it was? Conceptually I am all for the overthrow of despots and tyrants but the reality is we cannot keep sending the youth of America to various spots around the world to fight and die. America has a myriad of issues at home including spiraling inflation and we can ill afford to print more US dollars to fund an occupation in Asia. Not to mention China would not respond well to US forces occupying a country on their border; it would likely become a proxy war in the same way Vietnam did; might even prompt them to invade Taiwan forcing America to fight a war on 2 fronts. Ideas that seem straight forward in concept often turn into bloody quagmires when exposed to the realities of global politics.
During both of your options, how do you think China reacts to a massive US military invasion literally on its border?
Option 1, likely results in the government of Myanmar suddenly possessing dozens of previously unknown SAM batteries that just appeared as well as tens of thousands of troops that just materialized overnight wearing brand new Myanmar uniforms. The US loses thousands of troops and hundreds of billions in hardware. Likely evolves into a full on war with China where hundreds of thousands of people die.
Option 2 results in a full on war with China where hundreds of thousands of people die.
In both these options, China is just driving resources across the border. The us has a logistical nightmare where it has to move troops and resources halfway across the world.
> During both of your options, how do you think China reacts to a massive US military invasion literally on its border?
Very nasty, it will scare them beyond all heavens. And this is why you do it. You make enemies afraid of you, so they don't attack you, and your allies.
> The us has a logistical nightmare where it has to move troops and resources halfway across the world.
1. US has just got a nuclear ally in Asia. A rather untrusting ally for now. Dispell its doubts with show of determination.
2. US military logistics ability is bigger than the rest of the world's militaries combined.
Sorry friend, I was willing to engage with you in good natured debate but if you think that China's response will be cowering in fear then you are very much not versed in what's going on in the world, especially regarding China's capabilities and government. China is a military power very close to the US in capability. China commands and enforces absolute loyalty from its citizens, and is more than happy to turn to genocide to do so. They would have the advantage logistically as the conflict is taking place right outside their doorstep. The US appetite for war would probably fade very quickly once deaths start pouring in while the Chinese would just be forced to trudge on. A war with China does not stay in China, China is very capable of hitting the US mainland. China has a surplus of young men, the US does not. What you think would be China just cowering in fear would quickly devolve into WWIII.
> China is a military power very close to the US in capability.
False, Chinese military is numerically inferior to America, with nearly 4-fold disadvantage in combat aircraft, and already surrounded by US allies, and military assets.
Ultimately, China don't have enough nuclear weapons to destroy enough US military bases to prevent effective retaliation.
Again, you are not paying attention to logistics. America has to get its military aircraft to China and then once there China has an overwhelming array of surface to air missiles it can deploy from its own territory. The fact that you had to say "China don't have enough nuclear weapons to destroy enough US military bases to prevent effective retaliation" proves the reason the US will not invade Myanmar. We are not going to get into a nuclear conflict over the conditions in another country, especially a conflict where we are seen as the aggressor. China has an estimated 300+ nuclear warheads; potentially more, and missiles that are more than capable of delivering them anywhere in the US mainland. My point is that China will not cower in fear and do nothing if the US invades Myanmar, the fact that you think they will is mind boggling.
> China has an overwhelming array of surface to air missiles
False, China has at most 10 long to medium range air defence regiments, most near its capital.
For everything else, China's SAMs are outranged even by glide bombs.
> China has an estimated 300+ nuclear warheads; potentially more
That's obviously not enough to blunt even a quarter of US military potential, even if they have many times the number of missiles, or can launch them all in a surprise attack.
Friend, lets assume everything you said is correct. Is your advice really that the US risk absorbing 300+ nuclear missiles to send a message on the treatment of people in Myanmar? It defies logic and is very much removed from both reality and the will of the US population.
This seems to completely ignore the US's significant naval advantage and nuclear superiority, as well as a large number of well-armed allies around the world, and its satellite infrastructure
Also I think if US/China war happened, each country would break the other's civilian infrastructure (we know for sure that both countries actively probe the other's defences) badly enough that there would be serious threat to the health of billions of people, topple governments, and generally be harmful to a functioning economy.
China has demonstrated the ability to destroy satellites, generally has more battle ships than the US (although not aircraft carriers) and has missiles capable of sinking US ships. The entire argument is moot though, my point is that the US will not invade Myanmar because of the likely war with China that will result. Even if the US was able to defeat China, a likely situation, the victory would be pyrrhic as both countries would likely be devastated and have lost lives numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
That's how you gift PRC a firm client state with naval base and infra that circumvents Malacca and mitigates Andaman & Nicobar. US can only maximize logistics with forward staging, which is still tiny compared to Myanmar / PRC land routes, who can support Tatmadaw indefinitely, with little green men if need be. Regardless, unlikely anyone in the region will allow it, least of all India, whose already dealing with border instability and weakening security environment due to western bloc sanctioning Tatmadaw, ruining India's Act East strategy. PRC supported/loyal Tatmadaw is nightmare scenario for India. Also SKorea, Japan, Singapore - basically anyone that's remotely US friendly wants to protect their Myanmar investments, as far as I know, none of them are even on the sanction train.
At most you'll have US sorting out of CSGs, close to SLOC choke points, scaring everyone in ASEAN and making mockery of US's PRC containment propaganda, while PRC takes opportunity to gather intelligence and maybe give Myanmar military new PRC military platforms to test in real world scenarios. Which could actually go either way.
With that kind of characterization then label US "allies" for what they are, satraps. Which while the trio are somewhere on the continuum, they still have autonomy to realize US security commitment is only worthwhile if it ensures holistic security. Plunging entire region into war, potentially another forever one isn't in their security interest. At the end of the day security guarantee is a different arrangement than committed alliance, especially to contain PRC in their own backyard at all costs. Security partners are not allies who are obligated to come to US defense or bleed for US interests after all. That's not the kind of commitment US can twist arm for buy in. India/Modi doesn't seem very on board either. Ultimately, Jaishankar sees US/west as hegemon of yesterday and PRC/India collaboration as essential to Asian Century. Previously sanctioned Modi knows how fickle west can be, hasn't bought in outside of hedging. Certainly not enough to provide basing for US considering their history.
>I bet, in a decade or so, China will be back into a state of North Korea, except with skyscrapers if the US will do so.
US probably could do so, but the problem even NK emerging from rubble retained enough expertise to now have a nuclear program that credibly threatens US. But they're simply too small bargain for anything better. PRC on the other hand is large and capable enough to negotiate/fight for better, and could feasibly turn US (and satraps) into North Korea as well. IMO, short of utter calamity, PRC is simply too big to acquiesce to US foreign policy indefinitely and is in a position to at least make sure US suffers decline as much if not more.
The genocide has popular support. They don't need any weapons at all to carry out this genocide since it's the peoples wish. If you think setting up puppet government is a path to success you haven't been paying attention to the last 80 years of us history.
The amount of hubris involved here is staggering — and exactly why the neocons failed at their goals of reshaping the Middle East.
Our idea of a “proper government” may not align with the local population. This was certainly the case in Afghanistan; while yes, the Taliban are bad dudes with really regressive ideas about women, the country largely does support the Taliban for reasons that are missed by outside observers.
This is inconvenient for the US, but as a key bottleneck on the Silk Road, Afghanistan has essentially always been at war and some version of the Taliban have always defended the country. Their history is romanticized locally. We didn’t really grok that when we went in; and we were absolutely shocked when the locals basically said “you guys will leave eventually and we will have to deal with the Taliban, so we can’t piss them off because we need them for the next invasion”. Whatever “proper government” we build will be made up of the unsavory characters we leave behind when we exit.
It did not support Taliban. It has done so after 2 decades of Karzai, Ghani, and complete incompetence of US at building a political system, and the government from scam artists, and then doing god knows what with them.
We tried to find other people. Anyone with internal support was either too religious or too communist for our tastes, so we picked Karzai and his friends in the opium trade over anyone with actual ideological support (Karzai had tepid support from the opium farmers since he was their buyer, which was good enough for the US government).
If you think things would be any different in Myanmar — home of the golden triangle — you haven’t been paying attention to the lessons of the last 20 years.
> Burmese regime is one of world's most unruly, despotic, prolific, and it can be wiped out clean by US military with ease, without involving any of its allies
Maybe you missed the memo, but there is plenty of precedent for US getting its ass handed to it trying to "clean up" despotic states in SE Asia.
And as far as doing it without allies, to quote Robert McNamara:
> What makes us omniscient? Have we a record of omniscience? We are the strongest nation in the world today. I do not believe we should ever apply that economic, political, or military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn't have been there! None of our allies supported us; not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning.
US lost in Vietnam because people like him were idiots.
US military was not attacking, nor defending, but doing god knows what for entirety of the Vietnam campaign because cool kids like McNamara, Nixon, and Kisinger were coming up with their "innovative theories," and trying "redefining the nature of warfare, and politics."
For the entirety of Vietnam war, US military had the full logistic, intelligence, tactical, and technical capability to completely crush the North with ease.
I guess you're not talking about some well-executed surgical strike to take out the leadership? Because Ho Chi Minh, Giap and other NV leaders were moving around the country with impunity throughout the war, and the US never came close to working out where they were or taking them out, so poor was their intelligence.
So yeah, the US could have won by going nuclear, as Nixon briefly considered at Khe Sanh. But that wouldn't have turned the war, he would have had to escalate to nuking Hanoi. And destroying an entire population to effect regime change is not really "winning" in any sense of the word.
There was nothing simple about winning in Vietnam, and the US was never in any position to crush the North.
This reminds me of something I’ve been mulling over for a while.
Should it be illegal for a media outlet to publish the untested claims of a lawsuit?
I’ve seen this behavior all too often. “XYZ happened, person A did this, claims new suit”.
You can sue over just about anything, and make whatever absurd claims you want. People see these headlines and believe as if they have been settled in court when this is almost never the case at print time.
I think it's fine to report on the claims in a lawsuit once an initial hearing has taken place. If a judge reviews the claims and believes them to be reliable enough for the case to proceed, then it's enough to report as long as it's made clear that the claims are from a lawsuit that hasn't been fully tested in court.
The standard for surviving a motion to dismiss is really low in Federal Court. The court mostly assumes the factual allegations are true and then decides whether a claim could be made based on the law. So it's mostly a tool to weed out legally deficient law suits, but not factually wrong law suits.
The judge won't consider the actual evidence until the case progresses pretty far--the summary judgement stage. But even then, the judge only grants summary judgement if there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact.
I think news media outlets usually have to throw an "allegedly" in there somewhere. This is a direct link to the lawsuit though. The title was chosen by a user, presumably a private individual.
My one firmly held view about reporting on lawsuits is that it should be stigmatized to publish an article that doesn't also publish the docket number.
It's just cruel and shortsighted for the reporter to have the complaint right in front of them and not (1) publish the docket number and venue so readers can look up the current state of the case themselves; maybe also (2) publish the PDF.
I think making that sort of thing illegal raises a lot of thorny free speech and press freedom issues; a related and perhaps more approachable question might be: should it be considered journalistically unethical to produce such a headline?
It would be far more ethical to produce both suit and opposition.
"Person A alleges Company B did X, causing them to suffer damages. Company B states that X was actually Y and that they are not responsible for the damages Person A suffered. The courts will decide."
That is essentially what sueing is. Class action lawsuit filed seems very clear and concise to me. I expect to find those exact details in the article given the title
Yes, but that is what I think the press should support, rather than amplifying the most outrage producing view of the situation (of the type where the headline reads: "Company B's faulty widgets lead to Person A's excruciating death!" subtitle: "Screamed for hours the whole time he was dying. Family sues for millions" and then you later find out that Person A bought a bank vault full of widgets and swan dived into them like Scrooge McDuck).
Neutral news, or at least somewhat equally amplified and balanced views that don't have to be arbitrarily oppositional in nature.
Lawsuits are public records at the time they are filed, which in general is one of the foundational principles of the US. This is done for a good reason, so that judges and prosecutors can be held accountable.
Media Outlets can lie about anything, that includes already objectively justified data that came out of a direct legal proceeding.
I've seen this done a lot and it's done in such a way where they have blatantly lied and stated "X did Y" but actually the case stated and proved that "X never did Y".
How to correct that Media Outlet? Waste $$$ and time to get them to change their fake news. It doesn't work.
Between the UN fact-finding mission saying Facebook played a “determining role” in the genocide, the Bosworth memo, and the shit ton of access we now have thanks to the whistleblower, how is this not a strong case?
What if they just passively or inadvertently encouraged it? It’s entirely possible that the algorithms Facebook has used to prioritize content highlight inflammatory or violent content. Maybe in the process of maximizing attention they simultaneously optimized for showing violent or hateful content. YouTube has been shown to have done almost exactly that.
I'm not so sure you're right about that... Speech has limits and Facebook has corporate responsibility. They do monitor speech in the USA and still the impact is big (see January 6th) this is what happens with zero monitoring.
They can claim discrimination and many other such claims. It seems there's a lot of evidence to support criminal negligence. If inaction led to deaths a civil suit can get a big payout.
Facebook doesn't show content chronologically. Their algorithm decides what people see. They may not have purposefully pushed pro genocide content, but that doesn't mean they aren't liable if the court finds they were negligent in building the algorithm.
It might not be intentional, but there's a pretty good chance that it does lead to extremism. I haven't read it, but perhaps the UN report has more information.
I believe it could be true because it doesn't seem that different from reports[1] a few years ago talking about how YouTube would push more and more extreme suggestions.
IIRC YouTube made changes pushing people towards more mainstream content and away from small producers in part to avoid extremism.
There is no law against doing things that tend to encourage extremism. For example, it's would be perfectly legal for a communist to state in general terms that we should execute all rich people as class enemies. Now obviously that's a horrible thing to say, but it isn't illegal.
These all add up to a story where Facebook is doing bad things having a negative impact on the world, but that's a very different question than whether they violated any legal obligations. The plaintiff's primary theory of harm seems to be that Facebook allowed people to publish "extreme and outrageous hate speech, misinformation, and conspiracy theories", and publishing things like that would be legally protected in the US even if Mark Zuckerberg himself were the one writing them.
It's going to get into some very thick first-amendment weeds before section 230 protections are even introduced. Where do we draw the culpability line? Should Facebook have been legally obligated to ban those posts? If so, then if next week a failed coup attempt occurs in Burma to try and overthrow the military power that took control, should Facebook be held accountable for aiding and abetting the coup? We rapidly converge on a scenario where Facebook is culpable for existing, and then we may as well start shutting off forums in general.
With broad fringes, we generally draw the line at "no, the media isn't constrained from propagating a message; the responsibility rests on the speaker and the listener" in the US.
Not to say the suit has no merit. Merely that it faces a stiff headwind and a long uphill battle against a very laissez-faire freedom-of-information-flow precedent.
In general I think I agree with you, but on forums this is subtly different.
In a general internet forum, it's up to you decide what you read. On FB, there's an algorithm that determines your feed, and therefore the profit of Facebook itself.
If FB were connecting people, making the world a better place, and making profit by doing that, I think I'd be fine with that.
But it looks like FB can trade the general good will of people, replace it with extremism and make a profit doing so. And if that's true, I think we need to seriously look at section 230.
There's a series of commons that we all share (e.g. water, air). I'm not quite sure if this fits in this category, but for democracy to work, people have to agree to not resort to violence to solve their problems. Trading the common good will for your fellow country men for profit, while watching the world burn, is I think not what we want as a society.
The contents of the main page aren't decided by editors and moderators. It's an algorithm... granted, a simple one, but an algorithm nonetheless. Weighted factor of upvotes and age.
It's even game-able, if a person has a large enough posse to dump upvotes on a topic after creating it.
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.
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 HN is largely not making money off their website, since they're aren't selling targeted advertising -- at least not to the extent FB makes.
If your targeted algorithm makes the company money off planning a genocide, and if you're aware of it and do nothing about it (because lawyers say blah blah section 230 blah blah), that's a real problem. If you're making money from people whining about a bad call in a football game, so what? But if your company actively promotes criminal content and profits from it, then section 230 probably isn't going to save you. Either it will change, or the courts will force you to.
> Should Facebook have been legally obligated to ban those posts?
Did Facebook promoted that posts? That seems to be the problem. High hate seems to equal high engagement that equals more money.
If Facebook profited of promoting genocide posts, that is clearly morally wrong. It can easily be also illegal and a felony.
Facebook is not a chat but a curated feed of news. Back when it started it was not like that, but when the timeline became the curated feed then everything changed and responsibility is on the curators side.
Personally, I think Facebook's largest problem in this situation is that they were overly reliant on "AI" systems to flag hate speech, which is against their terms of service anyways.
The problem is that Myanmar up until recently (until after the genocide) wasn't even using Unicode, and Facebook only did the bare minimum to get Zawgyi-text processing up.
They also did not hire any Burmese language moderators until it was too late, in a country where Facebook more or less became synonymous with the internet. Meanwhile, Facebook had worked with local phone companies to preinstall the app on phones.
So again, I think this was growth at all costs, without thinking about the consequences, until they got enough egg on their face.
Here is a bit more detail on this determined role they took to spread the speech from reuters.
"To this day, the company continues to rely heavily on users reporting hate speech in part because its systems struggle to interpret Burmese text.
Even now, Facebook doesn’t have a single employee in the country of some 50 million people. Instead, it monitors hate speech from abroad. This is mainly done through a secretive operation in Kuala Lumpur that’s outsourced to Accenture, the professional services firm, and codenamed “Project Honey Badger.”
According to people familiar with the matter, the project, which handles many Asian countries, hired its first two Burmese speakers, who were based in Manila, just three years ago. As of June, Honey Badger had about 60 people reviewing reports of hate speech and other content posted by Myanmar’s 18 million active Facebook users. Facebook itself in April had three full-time Burmese speakers at a separate monitoring operation at its international headquarters in Dublin, according to a former employee."
I wasn't totally clear about the difference between total apathy, which I'm sure facebook had for a small country with a language not in system vs "determined effort".
The British, EU, and US can get away with extorting FB/MS/Apple every few years because the loss of those markets would be greater than the extortion they're asking for (in the form of regulations).
It's laughable that the small market Burmese think they can pull this garbage. Facebook doesn't need Myanmar and the Burmese government would best prepare for a second insurrection if they think their people would be okay with Facebook pulling out from Myanmar.
Not sure if a valid analogy, but don’t think engineers who designed and built autobahns or other infrastructure in Nazi Germany were held responsible for indirectly facilitating a genocide.
Some journalists and announcers for Radio Télévision Libre des Milles-Collines were given sentences after the Rwandan genocide. (I am not saying Facebook's role is at all comparable to RTLMC's)
I have no idea. I believe in Nuremburg trials (an exceptional and extraordinary situation far behind what this case claims) most of the legal power was brought to bear on leaders although we often say "just following orders" is not an excuse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders).
The people who created this case want to damage the leadership of the company (who set the primary policy decisions), not engineers or other staff, unless they could find that an engineer worked on their own (and documented in a discoverable way).
Honestly, I don't think this case has even a remote chance of making it through the courts. The filer would have done far better to not ask for a enormous monetary sum (2X the GDP of myanmar).
Well, Zuck did retain 51% control of the company. If there are any knives out in the org structure, I bet they'd be delighted to watch him take the blame. Plus aren't all the expensive lawyers tied up with Maxwell and Trump's allies right now?
Doesn't that presume guilt a bit? The whole point of a trial is to see if there is guilt, and if so maybe which parties are guilty will be shown (in the case of a company).
Yes, but isn't the presumption that you're only liable if you are in some way guilty (culpable) of what's being alleged?
In any case, just because someone's levied some charges doesn't mean we should necessarily assume they are accurate. I'm not s fan of Facebook by any means, but that doesn't mean I support trial by public opinion before there's even a chance for defense.
Software Engineers aren't really engineers IMHO. In the US, Professional Engineers are often licensed and can be punished for malpractice. Maybe licensing and enforcing standards of practice wouldn't be such a bad idea for software engineers.
They're the firm that won the USD $650 million privacy suit against Facebook earlier this year. They....kind of have a track record when it comes to class action lawsuits.
Obama graced Aung San Suu Kyi despite her well known track record. Obama also at similar times embraced Narendra Modi, despite his known track record. Obama even removed the Modi sanctions and visa block that George W Bush put on him after his alleged role in the Gujarat Muslim massacre/genocide. Newspapers gloated about Obama's bromance with Modi.
Interesting how you portrayed Obama in a way that he's a does-only-good person. He played a huge role in Arab springs which destroyed more lives than any of the other alleged bad deeds you refer. Some probably should sue him, not for indirect roles, but direct ones.
Presidents have complete legal immunity for all official acts. Cranks file lawsuits against Presidents all the time and judges immediately dismiss them.
At the time Bush visa-banned Modi, he was not the Prime Minister of India. By the time Obama embraced him, he was. For better or worse, Modi came to power in a free and fair, democratic election. Diplomacy demands treating him like any other leader of a major power.
So I'm a little confused. How is Facebook responsible for some thing a government did? Or is this just because they can't do anything to the government without invading.
Not to mention that Myanmar has had serious problems with repression of religious and ethnic minorities for decades. I find it very difficult to believe Facebook is the spark that ignited an already sectarian government in a country with a long history of ethnic persecution.
Seems kind of a wild leap to blame the rise of ISIS on Twitter.
ISIS came from the events in Iraq and is an offshoot of "Al Qaeda in Iraq". It even stands for "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant". They existed long before the Arab Spring.
The Arab Spring started in 2010 and ISIS didn't enter Syria (which I think is the connection you're making?) until well after that.
Twitter, and others, is a tool of the government, and national security state, and was weaponized multiple times to overthrow governments, institute color revolutions, allow terrorists to flourish etc... The Obama administration even bragged about it:
Governments should form an international institution to regulate the algorithms used by social media and search engines. The goal of this institution should strictly be to ensure that algorithms of big tech companies:
- Are impartial to specific (especially large) corporate or political interests.
- Promote decentralization.
Economic decentralization is necessary to ensure that markets remain competitive (which is good for consumers) and it limits how much power any specific entity has over society.
where they bend the truth. The headline is "5 points for an angry emoji, one for a like", but in reality it's 5 points for any emoji at all, and one for a like. Which I think makes sense, hitting like is something that's automatic for a lot of people, whereas taking the time to select an emoji that most closely matches your reaction to a post is a much more "engaged" interaction.
This is a distraction. No one is innocent. Ever. That doesn't remove the blame from the guilty party.
Your claim is similar to a guy running over me with his car then claiming I ran over someone else with a car a few years back. Two separate cases which have no baring on one another... Sounds like something a Facebook lawyer would say.
Sure, I'm not saying FB is not guilty. But one of the so-called "fake news" spread against the Rohingyas was specifically this - that they committed ethnic cleansing against others in Rakhine. Turns out it was not fake at all.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadFacebook is the global scale, slow motion online equivalent of the Fyre Festival.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-...
Facebook's scale comes with responsibility.
Now they have opened themselves to essentially unlimited legal liability.
Buy now, operators are standing by.
on edit: I guess it should be innocuous renditions of The Little Drummer boy to stick to the analogy, but I was momentarily taken by the little bunny idea.
Perhaps something similar is going on with some of these tech companies, where they use some really abstract name to which it's hard to attach negative emotions to.
Though you have a point, I know a lot of people who don't know that Alphabet is the parent of Google.
I can't think of any other explanation to why you'd use the word "Though" here.
Mark Zuckerberg is the head of the world's most mundane tech company at the moment, so he changed the name and the focus of the company to try and dig out of this hole.
It probably says more about me and my perceptions of social networks than anything else, and my perceptions of Facebook from the early days persisting with the name. But that's the thing with names, they don't matter. Except they actually do a little bit.
Plaintiff, v. META PLATFORMS, INC. (f/k/a Facebook, Inc.), a Delaware corporation
" Investors sue Meta for alleged failure to protect mental health of users "
https://www.jurist.org/news/2021/11/investors-sue-meta-for-a...
And
"‘An egregious breach of public trust’: Ohio sues Meta over whistleblower revelations"
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/nov/16/ohio-sues...
Does it stop every headline? No. But it helps disconnect the idea of "facebook the site" (pics of granny's cat) and "facebook the company" (shady)
Burmese regime is one of world's most unruly, despotic, prolific, and it can be wiped out clean by US military with ease, without involving any of its allies. https://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/military-rape-12032...
It’s these kinds of neo-colonialist urges that got us into the messes in Afghanistan and Iraq. We (the US in particular but also NATO as a whole) need to stop running around the world pretending we know the solution to everyone’s problems. Sometimes you have to let the local populations work it out themselves, and accept that China is a more natural ally for many countries in SE Asia.
Yes, if enemies think you are not tough, you get intimidated, humiliated, and then ultimately attacked.
> To redeem the “western world”?
Yes, to reverse the 20 years of disgrace, and regain the mandate of righteousness. Without righteousness, you can't do anything well as a united Western bloc — a raison d'etre for the entire post-war Western political system.
There is no righteousness on the world stage, only exploitation. The US has simply put itself ahead of its allies too many times for the world to trust us anymore.
I'm going to be very generous and your phrasing which sounds like you mean the US should commit ethnic cleansing.
I guess you mean the US should invade, occupy the country, impose new laws and police them. I guess you believe this because that has gone so well in the past.
Which means nothing remaining standing of the fixed infrastructure of Burmese army, and nothing moving remaining of its vehicles.
Burma has a strong, nation-wide oppositionary movement, which is now trampled by an even more powerful, and cutthroat Burmese army.
Without two things aforementioned, the balance will change. An aid of small arms supplies will be enough for the opposition to win, and unite the country.
It's only now, a once in 100 years opportunity came — to stop warring ethnic armies killing each other, in face of a common enemy with the Burmese ethnic majority.
This sounds a lot like what I remember hearing about the Iraq invasion, how we would be hailed as liberators.
We were, and then the whitehouse had to completely waste all of this goodwill, install Allawi, oust Allawi, fire up the whole Sunni-Shia thing, and then install Maliki as a counter.
1 option. Just destroy fixed assets, and most armour. US can do it in a few months of logistical preparations, and 1 week high intensity campaign.
2 option. Yes, but now build proper military hardpoint bases, and a proper government
Option 1, likely results in the government of Myanmar suddenly possessing dozens of previously unknown SAM batteries that just appeared as well as tens of thousands of troops that just materialized overnight wearing brand new Myanmar uniforms. The US loses thousands of troops and hundreds of billions in hardware. Likely evolves into a full on war with China where hundreds of thousands of people die.
Option 2 results in a full on war with China where hundreds of thousands of people die.
In both these options, China is just driving resources across the border. The us has a logistical nightmare where it has to move troops and resources halfway across the world.
Very nasty, it will scare them beyond all heavens. And this is why you do it. You make enemies afraid of you, so they don't attack you, and your allies.
> The us has a logistical nightmare where it has to move troops and resources halfway across the world.
1. US has just got a nuclear ally in Asia. A rather untrusting ally for now. Dispell its doubts with show of determination.
2. US military logistics ability is bigger than the rest of the world's militaries combined.
False, Chinese military is numerically inferior to America, with nearly 4-fold disadvantage in combat aircraft, and already surrounded by US allies, and military assets.
Ultimately, China don't have enough nuclear weapons to destroy enough US military bases to prevent effective retaliation.
False, China has at most 10 long to medium range air defence regiments, most near its capital.
For everything else, China's SAMs are outranged even by glide bombs.
> China has an estimated 300+ nuclear warheads; potentially more
That's obviously not enough to blunt even a quarter of US military potential, even if they have many times the number of missiles, or can launch them all in a surprise attack.
Also I think if US/China war happened, each country would break the other's civilian infrastructure (we know for sure that both countries actively probe the other's defences) badly enough that there would be serious threat to the health of billions of people, topple governments, and generally be harmful to a functioning economy.
At most you'll have US sorting out of CSGs, close to SLOC choke points, scaring everyone in ASEAN and making mockery of US's PRC containment propaganda, while PRC takes opportunity to gather intelligence and maybe give Myanmar military new PRC military platforms to test in real world scenarios. Which could actually go either way.
If that treacherous trio wasn't rooting for China, and not spending billions on their factories in China, the talk would be entirely different.
It's in US best interest to keep its allies in line. The worst thing they can do is really to die on US, by failing to resist China.
And I think, this is even more important now that getting Modi/India on board.
I bet, in a decade or so, China will be back into a state of North Korea, except with skyscrapers, if the US will do so.
US can't keep extending the security guarantee to Korea, Japan, and Taiwan with them putting money into China. It's a backstabbing.
With that kind of characterization then label US "allies" for what they are, satraps. Which while the trio are somewhere on the continuum, they still have autonomy to realize US security commitment is only worthwhile if it ensures holistic security. Plunging entire region into war, potentially another forever one isn't in their security interest. At the end of the day security guarantee is a different arrangement than committed alliance, especially to contain PRC in their own backyard at all costs. Security partners are not allies who are obligated to come to US defense or bleed for US interests after all. That's not the kind of commitment US can twist arm for buy in. India/Modi doesn't seem very on board either. Ultimately, Jaishankar sees US/west as hegemon of yesterday and PRC/India collaboration as essential to Asian Century. Previously sanctioned Modi knows how fickle west can be, hasn't bought in outside of hedging. Certainly not enough to provide basing for US considering their history.
>I bet, in a decade or so, China will be back into a state of North Korea, except with skyscrapers if the US will do so.
US probably could do so, but the problem even NK emerging from rubble retained enough expertise to now have a nuclear program that credibly threatens US. But they're simply too small bargain for anything better. PRC on the other hand is large and capable enough to negotiate/fight for better, and could feasibly turn US (and satraps) into North Korea as well. IMO, short of utter calamity, PRC is simply too big to acquiesce to US foreign policy indefinitely and is in a position to at least make sure US suffers decline as much if not more.
Our idea of a “proper government” may not align with the local population. This was certainly the case in Afghanistan; while yes, the Taliban are bad dudes with really regressive ideas about women, the country largely does support the Taliban for reasons that are missed by outside observers.
This is inconvenient for the US, but as a key bottleneck on the Silk Road, Afghanistan has essentially always been at war and some version of the Taliban have always defended the country. Their history is romanticized locally. We didn’t really grok that when we went in; and we were absolutely shocked when the locals basically said “you guys will leave eventually and we will have to deal with the Taliban, so we can’t piss them off because we need them for the next invasion”. Whatever “proper government” we build will be made up of the unsavory characters we leave behind when we exit.
It did not support Taliban. It has done so after 2 decades of Karzai, Ghani, and complete incompetence of US at building a political system, and the government from scam artists, and then doing god knows what with them.
Just like in Iraq.
If you think things would be any different in Myanmar — home of the golden triangle — you haven’t been paying attention to the lessons of the last 20 years.
Never get involved in a land war in Asia.
Maybe you missed the memo, but there is plenty of precedent for US getting its ass handed to it trying to "clean up" despotic states in SE Asia.
And as far as doing it without allies, to quote Robert McNamara:
> What makes us omniscient? Have we a record of omniscience? We are the strongest nation in the world today. I do not believe we should ever apply that economic, political, or military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn't have been there! None of our allies supported us; not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning.
US lost in Vietnam because people like him were idiots.
US military was not attacking, nor defending, but doing god knows what for entirety of the Vietnam campaign because cool kids like McNamara, Nixon, and Kisinger were coming up with their "innovative theories," and trying "redefining the nature of warfare, and politics."
For the entirety of Vietnam war, US military had the full logistic, intelligence, tactical, and technical capability to completely crush the North with ease.
The question is why it didn't?
So yeah, the US could have won by going nuclear, as Nixon briefly considered at Khe Sanh. But that wouldn't have turned the war, he would have had to escalate to nuking Hanoi. And destroying an entire population to effect regime change is not really "winning" in any sense of the word.
There was nothing simple about winning in Vietnam, and the US was never in any position to crush the North.
EDIT: to clarify, in this case "Jane Doe" is the plaintiff.
Should it be illegal for a media outlet to publish the untested claims of a lawsuit?
I’ve seen this behavior all too often. “XYZ happened, person A did this, claims new suit”.
You can sue over just about anything, and make whatever absurd claims you want. People see these headlines and believe as if they have been settled in court when this is almost never the case at print time.
The judge won't consider the actual evidence until the case progresses pretty far--the summary judgement stage. But even then, the judge only grants summary judgement if there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact.
It's just cruel and shortsighted for the reporter to have the complaint right in front of them and not (1) publish the docket number and venue so readers can look up the current state of the case themselves; maybe also (2) publish the PDF.
Neutral news, or at least somewhat equally amplified and balanced views that don't have to be arbitrarily oppositional in nature.
I've seen this done a lot and it's done in such a way where they have blatantly lied and stated "X did Y" but actually the case stated and proved that "X never did Y".
How to correct that Media Outlet? Waste $$$ and time to get them to change their fake news. It doesn't work.
They can claim discrimination and many other such claims. It seems there's a lot of evidence to support criminal negligence. If inaction led to deaths a civil suit can get a big payout.
I believe it could be true because it doesn't seem that different from reports[1] a few years ago talking about how YouTube would push more and more extreme suggestions.
IIRC YouTube made changes pushing people towards more mainstream content and away from small producers in part to avoid extremism.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/4/3/18293293/youtube...
Otherwise it would be a precedent for creating algorithms that break the law.
BTW, you are 100% reasonable I do not understand the down votes.
It is designed to reinforce existing beliefs and preferences in order to increase engagement.
In this case the beliefs were virulently racists and bigoted, and the engagement was usually done with a machete.
And it turns out that hate, fear, and tribalism are great for that.
With broad fringes, we generally draw the line at "no, the media isn't constrained from propagating a message; the responsibility rests on the speaker and the listener" in the US.
Not to say the suit has no merit. Merely that it faces a stiff headwind and a long uphill battle against a very laissez-faire freedom-of-information-flow precedent.
In a general internet forum, it's up to you decide what you read. On FB, there's an algorithm that determines your feed, and therefore the profit of Facebook itself.
If FB were connecting people, making the world a better place, and making profit by doing that, I think I'd be fine with that.
But it looks like FB can trade the general good will of people, replace it with extremism and make a profit doing so. And if that's true, I think we need to seriously look at section 230.
There's a series of commons that we all share (e.g. water, air). I'm not quite sure if this fits in this category, but for democracy to work, people have to agree to not resort to violence to solve their problems. Trading the common good will for your fellow country men for profit, while watching the world burn, is I think not what we want as a society.
It's even game-able, if a person has a large enough posse to dump upvotes on a topic after creating it.
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.
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.
If your targeted algorithm makes the company money off planning a genocide, and if you're aware of it and do nothing about it (because lawyers say blah blah section 230 blah blah), that's a real problem. If you're making money from people whining about a bad call in a football game, so what? But if your company actively promotes criminal content and profits from it, then section 230 probably isn't going to save you. Either it will change, or the courts will force you to.
Did Facebook promoted that posts? That seems to be the problem. High hate seems to equal high engagement that equals more money.
If Facebook profited of promoting genocide posts, that is clearly morally wrong. It can easily be also illegal and a felony.
Facebook is not a chat but a curated feed of news. Back when it started it was not like that, but when the timeline became the curated feed then everything changed and responsibility is on the curators side.
The problem is that Myanmar up until recently (until after the genocide) wasn't even using Unicode, and Facebook only did the bare minimum to get Zawgyi-text processing up.
They also did not hire any Burmese language moderators until it was too late, in a country where Facebook more or less became synonymous with the internet. Meanwhile, Facebook had worked with local phone companies to preinstall the app on phones.
So again, I think this was growth at all costs, without thinking about the consequences, until they got enough egg on their face.
"To this day, the company continues to rely heavily on users reporting hate speech in part because its systems struggle to interpret Burmese text.
Even now, Facebook doesn’t have a single employee in the country of some 50 million people. Instead, it monitors hate speech from abroad. This is mainly done through a secretive operation in Kuala Lumpur that’s outsourced to Accenture, the professional services firm, and codenamed “Project Honey Badger.”
According to people familiar with the matter, the project, which handles many Asian countries, hired its first two Burmese speakers, who were based in Manila, just three years ago. As of June, Honey Badger had about 60 people reviewing reports of hate speech and other content posted by Myanmar’s 18 million active Facebook users. Facebook itself in April had three full-time Burmese speakers at a separate monitoring operation at its international headquarters in Dublin, according to a former employee."
It's laughable that the small market Burmese think they can pull this garbage. Facebook doesn't need Myanmar and the Burmese government would best prepare for a second insurrection if they think their people would be okay with Facebook pulling out from Myanmar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide
The people who created this case want to damage the leadership of the company (who set the primary policy decisions), not engineers or other staff, unless they could find that an engineer worked on their own (and documented in a discoverable way).
Honestly, I don't think this case has even a remote chance of making it through the courts. The filer would have done far better to not ask for a enormous monetary sum (2X the GDP of myanmar).
In any case, just because someone's levied some charges doesn't mean we should necessarily assume they are accurate. I'm not s fan of Facebook by any means, but that doesn't mean I support trial by public opinion before there's even a chance for defense.
Are you asking if the company that created this document actually filed it?
Here's some news about it
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-...
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/your-profit-fuelled-genoc...
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/11/world/lawsuit-says-ibm-ai...
And this one
https://edition.cnn.com/2004/LAW/07/08/ramasastry.holocaust....
Just as an example you can find lawsuits against Uber for misclassifying its workers as independent contractors instead of employees.
Not sure what of facts you have that shows American companies using slaves and being immune from civil or criminal lawsuits.
Will they now sue Obama?
https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/asia-and-australia/how-au...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/9/14/obama-to-aung-san-s...
https://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/27/asia/india-obama-modi-loo...
ISIS came from the events in Iraq and is an offshoot of "Al Qaeda in Iraq". It even stands for "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant". They existed long before the Arab Spring.
The Arab Spring started in 2010 and ISIS didn't enter Syria (which I think is the connection you're making?) until well after that.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jun/17/obama-iran-twi...
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/world/middleeast/17media....
- Are impartial to specific (especially large) corporate or political interests.
- Promote decentralization.
Economic decentralization is necessary to ensure that markets remain competitive (which is good for consumers) and it limits how much power any specific entity has over society.
where they bend the truth. The headline is "5 points for an angry emoji, one for a like", but in reality it's 5 points for any emoji at all, and one for a like. Which I think makes sense, hitting like is something that's automatic for a lot of people, whereas taking the time to select an emoji that most closely matches your reaction to a post is a much more "engaged" interaction.
1. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/05/myanmar-new-e...
Your claim is similar to a guy running over me with his car then claiming I ran over someone else with a car a few years back. Two separate cases which have no baring on one another... Sounds like something a Facebook lawyer would say.