A family's tragedy leads to U.S. Supreme Court social media showdown

reuters.com

3 points·pseudolus··2 comments

This is analogous to alleging a company is complicit in an MS13 murder committed by an illegal immigrant, because the company wasn't strict enough in checking the immigration status of their employees. Or, ignoring sovereign immunity, alleging permissive immigration policy and lax border enforcement render the state culpable for crimes committed by immigrants, legal or illegal, that would otherwise not be in the country in the first place.

It's significantly curtailing freedom, mostly of innocents, for the sake of alleged safety. One is freedom of movement, the other of speech.

Presumably the family petitioning the Supreme Court wouldn't ask the US to sacrifice immigration for the (alleged) sake of a handful of murders, so what makes freedom of speech a more legitimate sacrifice?

I think your analogy is incorrect. The plaintiffs are alleging that Google’s algorithm targeted people susceptible to radicalization by feeding them videos designed to inspire radicalization. On the surface this appears to have merit in my opinion.

We know how easy it is to manipulate people at scale and algorithms designed to find out which content will feed into a person’s dopamine response system should be banned. Humanity is not psychologically prepared to handle social media in the way Google and Facebook do manipulation. These companies are not mere platforms. They are like virtual drug dealers.

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