this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
1012 points (98.0% liked)
Technology
59605 readers
3345 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I really don’t like cases like this, nor do I like how much the legal system seems to be pushing “guilty by proxy” rulings for a lot of school shooting cases.
It just feels very very very dangerous and ’going to be bad’ to set this precedent where when someone commits an atrocity, essentially every person and thing they interacted with can be held accountable with nearly the same weight as if they had committed the crime themselves.
Obviously some basic civil responsibility is needed. If someone says “I am going to blow up XYZ school here is how”, and you hear that, yeah, that’s on you to report it. But it feels like we’re quickly slipping into a point where you have to start reporting a vast amount of people to the police en masse if they say anything even vaguely questionable simply to avoid potential fallout of being associated with someone committing a crime.
It makes me really worried. I really think the internet has made it easy to be able to ‘justifiably’ accuse almost anyone or any business of a crime if a person with enough power / the state needs them put away for a time.
Do you not think if someone encouraged a murderer they should be held accountable? It's not everyone they interacted with, there has to be reasonable suspicion they contributed.
Also I'm pretty sure this is nothing new
I didn’t say that at all, and I think you know I didn’t unless you really didn’t actually read my comment.
I am not talking about encouraging someone to murder. I specifically said that in overt cases there is some common sense civil responsibility. I am talking about the potential for the the police to break down your door because you Facebook messaged a guy you’re friends with what your favorite local gun store was, and that guy also happens to listen to death metal and take antidepressants and the state has deemed him a risk factor level 3.
I must have misunderstood you then, but this still seems like a pretty clear case where the platforms, not even people yet did encourage him. I don't think there's any new precedent being set here
Rulings often start at the corporation / large major entity level and work their way down to the individual. Think piracy laws. At first, only giant, clear bootlegging operations were really prosecuted for that, and then people torrenting content for profit, and then people torrenting large amounts of content for free - and now we currently exist in an environment where you can torrent a movie or whatever and probably be fine, but also if the criminal justice system wants to they can (and have) easily hit anyone who does with a charge for tens of thousands of dollars or years of jail time.
Will it happen to the vast majority of people who torrent media casually? No. But we currently exist in an environment where if you get unlucky enough or someone wants to punish you for it enough, you can essentially have this massive sentence handed down to you almost “at random”.