If 1A companies can be held liable for damages through the regular use of their products then 1000% 2A companies can be held accountable for the same thing.
I mean if you WANT Social Media companies like Meta and Reddit enforcing content restrictions then sure, why not. Droves of people will argue that the 1st Amendment doesn’t apply to an individuals use of a commercial platform. In fact tens of millions of people, or even more, have been vehemently arguing exactly that going back to at least 2018.
If by “2A Companies” you mean firearms manufacturers, well, the most common “regular uses” of their products are shooting targets and gathering dust. You’ll probably try and argue that but the math is pretty simple, ~17 Million are sold every year and less than 1% of them are involved in illegal activity. You are literally trying to take the 1% and somehow make it the norm.
To call the regular use of a tool built and designed for killing people anything other than that, it rings a bit hollow for me.
Its a pretend world to live in to say that firearms were ever developed with anything else other than the explicit purposes of killing humans. There are a few exceptions but they are such edge cases they aren’t worth mentioning, and the tradition of use goes from the first fire arms to basically all fire arms manufactured now. And its fine. Its fine that this is their design goal and purpose, but to be in denial of that is absurd.
So I stand by my point. If a communications and media platform can be held liable for the regular use of its product, then so to can a weapons manufacturer. It doesn’t matter if they put “for entertainment purposes only” in faint white text on the bottom of every Facebook page, in the same way it doesn’t matter if you write “for recreational purposes only” on the box of an AR.
I’m not sure how the current Supreme Court would rule, but any consistent read of the constitution and prior rulings would suggest that there is no 1A case here; if there is, it would likely supersede much of 2A law.
To call the regular use of a tool built and designed for killing people anything other than that, it rings a bit hollow for me.
Be that as it may for 99% of firearms sold in the United States their “regular use” has nothing to do with killing people. That’s the best case argument too. If we looked at it another way there’s probably 500,000,000 firearms in the United States so the “killing people” part drops to something like .005%. So for between 99% and 99.995% of firearms their “regular uses” are completely and utterly benign.
It can be tough to accept, especially when we’re seguing from firearms, but tools are often used for things other than what they were designed for and the Internet itself is a great example. It wasn’t meant for normal people but today most people have it in their pocket…which has lead directly to the struggles we are having with Social Media.
Should companies like Meta and Reddit be responsible for the comments of their users? Perhaps but a ruling like that would have tremendous impacts, many of them strongly negative, for every Social Media company in the United States and that would almost certainly include Lemmy and its users.
I’m not saying such a ruling would be completely wrong but down this road I see the end of anonymity on the Internet. Companies and website operators will seek to shield themselves from these kinds of lawsuits by doing identity verification so that if a problem users gets them sued they can in turn point the barrel of that legal canon at whomever(s) made the comments.
I mean your ratios probably also work for social media right? Maybe comparable in that an incredibly small number of people actually do things like the Buffalo massacre.
I just don’t see how you can have it both ways as a ruling. That being said, the current supreme court is a mockery of logic, law, and justice, so I could totally see this happening.
I mean your ratios probably also work for social media right?
Yep, they do. Which is why we are continually struggling with whether Social Media is a Platform or Publisher. The former doesn’t have content control while the latter does; which means that a Platform shouldn’t be liable for this while a Publisher should.
I just don’t see how you can have it both ways as a ruling.
You really can’t. If a Social Media company has content control then they can be held liable for the actions of their users. If they don’t have content control then they can’t be responsible for what their end users do and can’t be sued for it.
We as a society need to pick an approach and run with it. As for me personally I don’t think Companies should generally be responsible for what end users do with their products. A companies responsibility ends after the money changes hands except in the case of product liability for defect or being unfit for purpose.
An argument can be made for making Companies responsible for what is done with their products but we need to go into that with eyes wide open because it would have massive repercussions across all industries. Wait until Ford won’t sell someone a new car because they’ve had too many speeding tickets or accidents. Are we ready for that?
The families of those murdered in the racist mass shooting in Buffalo in 2022 can continue with their lawsuits against social media companies that they contend helped fuel the killer’s racist hate.
A judge this week refused to dismiss the lawsuits against the social media companies, including Meta (Facebook), 4Chan, Reddit and YouTube. The social media companies had sought the dismissal.
Payton Gendron, who fatally shot 10 Black people at a Buffalo Tops supermarket in May 2022, was partly driven by his belief in what is known as the “white replacement theory,” Erie County-based state Supreme Court Justice Paula Feroleto noted in her decision.
Pretty sure Section 230 will get this thrown out, but I’m interested in the legal arguments.
Good news. Unfortunately, social media companies are so obscenely wealthy now that even an Alex Jones-size fine would be a slap on the wrist. Meta and Google both have revenue above $1 trillion.
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