So the phone company provided a way for criminals to organize in secret and communicate with each other without having to meetup in person so the phone company is responsible for that crime?
Unless I mis-understood your argument. It seemed to be that you should be responsible for everything bad someone else does with something you made. You made a cooking knife. Someone stabs someone with it. It's your responsibility. You shouldn't have introduced cooking knives into the world knowing that people might stab others with them.
My take on the debate over internet censorship is that the "free speech" contingent badly wants to deal with it using elegant, consistent, universal principles.
While a solution that meets those criteria should always be the goal, we must recognize when it isn't possible. If we don't, we wind up with something that satisfies our ideology without actually being a good solution.
Such issues often result in new law. If any phenomenon creates a certain level of harm, a society is liable to alter its laws to deal with it, breaking with convention if necessary.
Regarding your phone company example, what that means is that the answer to your question might depend on the extent to which the criminal activity is harming society.
Regarding Facebook, I'm open to betraying my normal principles, because the amount of injury Facebook does to the world justifies exceptional remedies.
Not really, it would be akin to phone company allowing it's users to create multi-user international terrorist hotline, and refusing any kind of responsibility for it... while also sending out promotional material to people they deemed 'potential terrorists'
I think you are not taking into account that the knife and the phone are not "mass/broadcast" tools. They are one to one, one to few at most.
Moreover facebook is not a neutral conduit, the algorithmic feed act as an editor for a newspaper (and an editor that can give each person their own personal newspaper at that!)
That is a simplified argument. Facebook is not a phone company. A phone company has an amplification effect on communication, but Facebook, with a billion customers reachable through their choice of algorithms is in a totally different class. A phone company doesn’t push content on the user. Facebook does.
> You made a cooking knife. Someone stabs someone with it. It's your responsibility. You shouldn't have introduced cooking knives into the world knowing that people might stab others with them.
This is the logic used to put drug dealers and manufacturers in prison when people overdose on their drugs and die.
> So the phone company provided a way for criminals to organize in secret and communicate with each other without having to meetup in person so the phone company is responsible for that crime?
This is a bad analogy. The phone company isn't a broadcaster. Facebook is.
Unless I mis-understood your argument. It seemed to be that you should be responsible for everything bad someone else does with something you made. You made a cooking knife. Someone stabs someone with it. It's your responsibility. You shouldn't have introduced cooking knives into the world knowing that people might stab others with them.