What’s Facebook’s responsibility when the nation seeks to lynch someone? | Hacker News Reader

What’s Facebook’s responsibility when the nation seeks to lynch someone?

pandodaily.com

101 pointsmuratmutlu85 comments

The 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 verified facts. That's called reporting.

To be fair, this was not a rumor...their police sources had been mixed up because the shooter died with his brother's ID....that is the explanation, anyway...so much of this story has been contradiction after contradiction that it almost seems like someone in the police department is a 4chan troll

Even if the name was 'right', it was still the news organisations getting the wrong individual with that name.

News organizations are generally irresponsible. Remember the Zaniada Gonzales debacle? A poor woman was nearly lynched for having the same name as an imaginary person dreamed up by some child killer.

I don't think you can even remotely refer to it as a phone book and this is not to be pedantic. With Facebook, you communicate, albeit mostly inane drivel that passes for "thoughts" but you can communicate. In fact, you can use Facebook to whip people into an angry frenzy, directly, rather than just use it as a directory to call people indirectly organize a lynch mob. In some ways, you could say the harassment is actually occurring on Facebook.

How could facebook respond to this anyway? Do they scour all news for incorrectly attributed stories with facebook links? That would be impossible.

If only there was some kind of social platform where Facebook employees could share information like this and it would end up being forwarded to the appropriate people...

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

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?

Hi all,

Ryan's roommate here, longtime HN lurker.

It would have been nice if FB locked down his profile a little sooner, for sure. I imagine we're going to be dealing with this shit for a while to come now.

If you wouldn't mind, can you help us get the hashtag #ApologizeToRyan off the ground? Maybe social media can be used to restore his good name, too.

No promises on the hash tag, but I lend my condolences on any losses he may have in this awful scenario.

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.

Internet Lynch Mobs: JUST SAY NO

Sorry to be simplistic, but that rule is the best. If you think you need to pile on someone, don't.

Our primal lizard brains just love to stomp the shit out of someone, so when society gives us signals that it's okay, we love to do it. We must resist this urge before Piggy's head get crushed by a boulder.

Here's an interesting article about recent actual lynchings in Nigeria, pretty frightening stuff: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/10/per...

Sometimes it can be frustrating to operate within the rule of law, but the alternatives are pretty scary.

Every time something like this happens people react in quite predictable ways, the creation of Facebook pages is one of the more common ones. Why do people do this? Does it come from social pressure to show just how angry they are with actions, is it just how people cope with terrible news (by doing something even if it's ultimately futile) or is it just another case of humans doing irrational things? My google-fu isn't very good so no results of relevance are coming up, but it seems like there must be a reason behind these reactions.

A combination of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramaturgy_%28sociology%29 , probably.+

That actually took some work to Google up. I thought I'd be able to find something specifically about humans faking social signals in exactly this context, but I didn't. Also, "social signalling" is full of results about trying to teach computers how to deal with human social signals, and how to process data from social networks (not quite the same thing). It's a busier term that I thought it would be.

(Dramaturgy is a word I'd never encountered before, either, though I've noticed the concept in play in people around me. Not mentioned in the Wikipedia page that I could see, but something you can probably see once you are looking, is that some people act as if they are in a play constantly, but are playing to the wrong audience. I have a relative who acts as if the entire world is a soppy mid-day women's talk show and constantly play up their concern to an audience who is actually pretty OK with, say, a 12-year old riding a bike without having to express concern every time that they are going to hurt themselves. And there's always some people who never seem to leave High School, or at least take a few decades longer than it should to realize that they're not on that stage anymore.)

I can't offer a psychological explanation, but my impression from the people I know who are the most eager to offer their opinion on the shooter is that they love it, that this is the coolest thing that happened to them this month. They'd be bored without it (or they'd be stirring up drama with their friends or co-workers.) They say they're angry, but they seem more excited and gleeful. Some people love tracking hurricanes, some people love elections, and some people love tragedies. It's a break from their boring lives, a dramatic and important occasion to share some excitement with millions of other people. Like when Princess Diana died -- suddenly a lot of people realized that she was really, really, really important to them. (Not that she wasn't important to a lot of people, but there were also plenty of people who were determined not to get left out of the excitement even though they only had a vague idea who she was.) With Princess Diana it was grief, and with Ryan/Adam Lanza it's righteous anger. People are just enjoying the hell out of it.

Sure, it's something to get whipped up into a frenzy about. There's a reason we all know about pitchforks and yet few of us would know how to use them for their proper purpose. I think there are several things at play here, one is this kind of "entertainment" that you describe. The other is arm-chair psychology many of us engage in about what this shooter was like, even before there was any stable information out there. It's mostly just ignorance.

Dramaturgy is pretty well explained in Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" as the Pranksters' concept of everyone living in their own movie.

I'm sure there a myriad of things at work here but let's first consider YouTube comments. Go on YouTube, find just about video that has more than 10 or so comments. It will inevitably devolve into some hate filled tirade, usually racist or sexist in nature. I think basically what it boils down to is that there are a lot of really ignorant (any political site, especially right wing), and angry, hateful people out there that want to burn someone for anything. Now couple the fact that there are so many deranged people and then give them a place to blabber away, the Internet, and you have a recipe for constant demagoguery and witch-burning. It's kind of like "letters to the editor." It's mostly the idiots that are whipped up in enough frenzy to even care to write these kinds of letters; Facebook pages and Twitter campaigns are just another form of this phenomenon.

This 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.

How would you make that case? There are plenty of restrictions on free speech as well as freedom of the press, which is far from absolute, and is most certainly regulated.

True, but a restriction on printing the names of criminals and victims would be considered a "content-based restriction," which are subject to strict scrutiny.

There is an established legal basis for allowing publication of victim's names: "Thus, it is ordinarily unconstitutional for a state to proscribe a newspaper from publishing the name of a rape victim, lawfully obtained. This is because there ordinarily is no compelling governmental interest in protecting a rape victim’s privacy" (4). IANAL, but permission to print criminal's names (which are obtained legally) follows from similar logic.

[0]: Congressional Research Service: Exceptions to the First Amendment: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/95-815.pdf

Key term: "ordinarily."

Right, so "in the majority of rapes." Which extends to the "majority of crimes."

"Ordinarily" also implies that it's subject to change. There's nothing inherent in the law that prevents the change being discussed, other than the status quo.

Ironically, RSF places the Netherlands in #3 place of the Press Freedom Index, and the US comes in at #47.

http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index-2011-2012,1043.html

The US's fall from #20 is largely a result of arrests of reporters attempting to document the Occupy movement.

While freedom of the press in the US may be violated pragmatically, you'd have a much harder time challenging it philosophically. That is, police offers arresting individual reporters (especially ones involved in protest) slips by relatively easily, but a federal law placing limits on what information the press can publish would receive strong opposition.

So... what? It would be hard for authorities in the US to pass a law restricting speech, so instead they just restrict speech without going through the bother of making a law about it? How is that better?

It's better than restricting speech through law AND enforcement. I'm not supporting the current state of affairs; not at all. Just pointing out that you'd have trouble pushing such a (legal) restriction on the US press.

>It's better than restricting speech through law AND enforcement.

Are you sure about that? If a government passes a law restricting speech because it has to, and then enforces it to restrict speech, it isn't clear to me that's worse than a government which doesn't bother with laws in the first place. Either way, you have no freedom of speech, but at least with the former you still have some semblance of rule of law. That's more important than speech, IMO (although of course without both you're already pretty fucked).

That’s why I prefer putting human dignity in front of freedom of speech (like, e.g. the German constitution does). That way you have to decide between the dignity of those whose names will be published and freedom of speech – and the dignity wins.

Contrary to what the parent comment asserts, they are not prohibited from printing the full name. It's a gentlemen's agreement between the various media organisations not to do so.

Sounds like a bug in how the first amendment is written and interpreted, you should fix that.

It ever ceases to amaze me how stuck America is where it's constitution is concerned. It's hundreds of years old and never imagined times like now. Change it. Those that wrote it would have changed it if it didn't suit them. Do the same.

I'll agree that the Constitution is horribly outdated in many situations and that the amendment process is unnecessarily complex.

But this is one situation that DID exist in 1787. Surely there were criminals in big(ish) cities, and surely the press was reporting on those criminals. Perhaps social media makes press errors more damaging, but the principle—protecting the privacy of criminals and victims—very much existed back then.

> Dutch publishers are prohibited to publish last names of suspects (even after conviction)

In Poland similarily, but it's applied only at the moment he's officially charged and lifted after convinction. Also they cover the eyes on pics, etc.. It's hilarious when famous people get acccused of something ("ex deputy prime minister Andrzej L.", "famous journalist and tv and radio star Kuba W.").

I wonder what (if any) legal recourse Ryan Lanza might have against the news agencies that libeled his name. I imagine it really depends on the exact wording used, but Ryan could have a great defamation/emotional distress case on his hands, when everything settles.

Is it possible to do a... reverse class-action suit? In which you file suit against everyone who created a "Ryan Lanza burn in hell" Facebook page, every news outlet that libeled you, etc., all at once?

That's just called naming multiple defendants.

Talk to the RIAA/MPAA/MAFIAA about that, they do it all the time.

There's a very large legal industry surrounding shotgun legal claims in rapid succession throughout the country.

The nice thing about America is that you can sue anyone for anything (even if the case has no merit and goes nowhere).

But winning a libel suit is no panacea — it doesn't magically make your life better. See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jewell#Libel_cases and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jewell#Aftermath .

Might not make your life better, but it would be incredibly satisfying.

In the US it is very hard to win a libel case (as the plaintiff). Basically, you have to prove that the news agencies intentionally and maliciously libeled you. This is pretty darn near impossible to prove in most cases. If I recall correctly, an example of a case where a libel lawsuit would be successful is one where the new agency makes up something or encourages a source to make up something.

EDITS (replies to below):

Defamation laws in the US are actually very complex and in certain cases ambiguous. Different states have different standards for civil liability. In Gertz v. Robert Welch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertz_v._Robert_Welch,_Inc.), which involved a newspaper publishing lies about a non-public official, the Supreme Court held that state defamation laws had to have the plaintiff prove at the very least fault of some kind on the defendant's part, and that for punitive damages malice must be proved. The court also found that people cannot be made into a public official.

Certain statements are considered to be inherently damaging and fault does not need to be proved.

Regardless, clearly Ryan Lanza does not have a case since law enforcement officials did originally identify him, wrongly, as the suspect. The police were clearly not negligent because the reason they ID'd him as the gunman was because his ID was found on the gunman's body. I don't know if the news actually stated as a fact that he was guilty.

This is not true. The standard of actual malice applies only to public figures.

OK. So he was identified as the suspect. First, is there a case against the police? This is assuming that it was police recklessness/negligence and Ryan was never an actual suspect. Second, having been identified as the suspect, did any of the media outlets go on to defame him given that he was not actually tried and convicted? If XYZ News Corp receives the name from an official statement saying he is the suspect, and then runs a story accusing him of murder, does that make them libelous? I'm sure there are editorial standards about what can be said of a person between being declared a suspect and declared guilty.

> Regardless, clearly Ryan Lanza does not have a case since law enforcement officials did originally identify him, wrongly, as the suspect.

They did? The article made it sound like they used the name Ryan Lanza, but that they didn't identify which Ryan Lanza.

It's very difficult in the US. The argument will be he was a public figure, which would make it near impossible (actual malice) His argument will be he was a private figure, which would make it possible (negligence, though state law varies).

First person to say "he wasn't a public figure, they made him one" gets the fun job of making new law about it.

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.

Could he claim copyright to the photo of himself that they used and sue them for copyright infringement? It seems like a stretch but how did they receive permission to republish that image?

Does he even own that image? I thought once it was uploaded to Facebook it became property of Facebook.

It's not Facebook's property; they just get an unlimited license to reproduce it in order to provide their service. For organizations that are not Facebook, I'm sure the situation is much more murky.

Although a defense, Fair Use would certainly allow news organizations to publish those images without concern.

Maybe, but he could dmca them. There is basically no penalty for that, even if they win.

Well, no, it's Fair Use. It's a legal defense, but since a news site would be hosting their own content, and editorializing, they would be be able to claim safe harbor. So a DMCA takedown would be effectively ignores, and followed up in the courts. Regardless, it's text book fair use. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

He would have a much better chance suing media companies in the UK, Europe and Australia who repeated the claims, since the libel laws are much looser there.

Almost impossible to win a libel case in the USA, it will almost certainly be shot down on first amendment grounds or with him being/becoming a public figure after the police named him.

This is not Facebook's responsibility. This is everybody's responsibility not to be an idiot. Unfortunately, too many people fail at this responsibility. But enabling them by saying "it's the press" or "it's the Facebook", not "it is you - personally you - being an idiot by believing unchecked information" is not helping either. When "the nation" - or, more precisely, a bunch of very foolish people - seek to lynch someone, they should be told "you are fools. Not go home and think about it", not "is Facebook to blame for it? Is Reuters? Can we find anybody - preferably big faceless corporation - to take the blame?"

Maybe 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.

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.

If these social networks wished to discourage such behavior, they could create a "most popular comment" feature that pinned something you said publicly and in the last few months in your public profile, then quietly tweak their algorithms to prefer public lynch-mob dickishness or other bad behavior to this spot.

That's a terrifying thought, that centrally-run social networks are actually in a position to perform this kind of conditioning. What could Facebook do, if it tried to socially engineer the entire world?

"...should Facebook be more proactive in removing (at least provisionally) hate groups like the ones listed above? Okay, before you start crying foul about free speech and the 1st amendment..."

Is there some Facebook Constitution I'm not aware of? What duty does Facebook have to uphold the first amendment?

Seems Adam Lanza, Ryan Lanza's brother is the suspect and that his mom, a teacher was killed in the shootout as well. http://gawker.com/5968551/ryan-lanza-is-a-cold-blooded-murde...

>(Gawker also changed its story, but proof of the original headline is still in the URL)

You can put anything in the URL you like, as long as the number matches and it passes whatever regular expression gawker runs on those URLs, it will point to the right news story. Hardly conclusive proof that gawker changed the headline when someone can do something like http://gawker.com/5968551/ryan-lanza-is-a-cold-blooded-murde... and the URL bar doesn't even change to reflect the original title.

Either way, they say what they ammended the title from at the bottom of the post.

Well, I think the idea is that the link Gawker released initially was the one that got passed around the most and posted on facebook page, twitter, etc. ( I know I posted it. )

As a result, I believe that would also be the URL that ranks highest in a Google search.

Regardless of what text gets added after the number so to an extent, for popular posts, whichever title Gawker releases first will be set in stone.

I'm not very familiar with regexes so I don't really understand why they would need one on the URL. It seems you can drop the string part of that "suffix" altogether.

Purely SEO. Articles being identified by number is much cleaner programming-wise, but search engines like it when URLs have text in them to index against. It's also good for readability of URLs in general, really.

Facebook 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.

I 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).

Sloppy journalism, for sure ... but libel? Maybe. If so, by carrying his brother's id, the shooter may have left him a parting gift of financial security. Surely not planned ... (?)

This page has some serious issues with it's floating header in Chromium on Xubuntu 12.04 http://i.imgur.com/5Z3H6.png

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."

If you buy the argument that the Internet would be better off if everyone had their own domain names (as was recently discussed on HN), it doesn't make much sense to then take Facebook to task for not getting involved.

This is about the existence of institutions of government

We learnt a long time ago that two sides who cannot trust each other must have a third party whom they can trust to behave in a particular (fair) way all the time.

That third party becomes a mechanism for government.

Facebook cannot be trusted because Facebook has no controlling mind. Just like HN here.

Institutions cannot be crowd sourced or socially generated. They must be based on principles and be independent and incorruptible.

We give professors and judges lifetime contracts with no get out clauses - and we do it for a reason. When Facebook is public ally funded we will need it to have a controlling mind

And this yet another reason I don't have a facebook. Although, it seems the news media seems to think anyone without facebook is a psychopath as well. Lose, lose.

I think Ryan should receive a lot of money from the media. Can the media really just ruin somebody's life and not even pay a dime for it?

The answer is yes. They can. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20267989

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