Facebook Sued for $1 Billion for Alleged Use of Medium for Terror

[lovuian]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-11/facebook-sued-for-1b-for-alleged-hamas-use-of-medium-for-terror




Damages sought for families of 5 American victims of attacks
Facebook says it doesn’t comment to press on legal proceedings


Lawyers filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Facebook Inc., alleging it allowed the Palestinian militant Hamas group to use the platform to plot attacks that killed four Americans and wounded one in Israel, the West Bank and Jerusalem.

“Facebook has knowingly provided material support and resources to Hamas in the form of Facebook’s online social network platform and communication services,” making it liable for the violence against the five Americans, according to the lawsuit sent to Bloomberg by the office of the Israeli lawyer on the case, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner.

[Orrex]

1. Interesting, but I don't know how this might stand up

It could as readily be argued that Israel can be sued for maintaining the roads on which the terrorists traveled.

[bluedye33139]

2. Psychics? Seances?

I had to reread the title a few times to realize that, no, Facebook was not being accused of funneling frightening messages through psychics at seances.

[scscholar]

3. This. Facebook is large, not medium. (ntxt)

[longship]

4. I thought Sylvia Browne was dead.

Maybe the FB medium is channeling Sylvia Browne.

One wonders if they get the gravel voice correct.

"The kid's dead!"

[Xithras]

5. Nope. Zeran v. AOL. This will be tossed quickly.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act immunizes the providers of online services against the acts of their users, unless the users can explicitly show that the service was created to perpetuate those acts. It's going to be pretty damned hard to prove that Zuck created Facebook for the purpose of supporting terrorism, and federal law insulates them from responsibility for any incidental usage.

This is also why sites like Backpage can advertise prostituion, even though prostitution is a crime nearly everywhere, while sites like MRB get shut down for the same thing. Backpage is a general classifieds site that some people use for prostitution. MRB was a classifieds site designed specifically to promote prostitution. One was protected by the CDA, and the other wasn't.

And that's a good thing.


Section 230(c)(1) of the CDA reads: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." In other words, you can't hold the service provider responsible. In Zeran v. AOL, the Fourth Circuit explicitly laid out the implications of that exemption: "creates a federal immunity to any cause of action that would make service providers liable for information originating with a third-party user of the service." Its ruling stated "lawsuits seeking to hold a service liable for its exercise of a publisher's traditional editorial functions – such as deciding whether to publish, withdraw, postpone or alter content – are barred. The purpose of this statutory immunity is not difficult to discern. Congress recognized the threat that tort-based lawsuits pose to freedom of speech in the new and burgeoning Internet medium. ... Section 230 was enacted, in part, to maintain the robust nature of Internet communication ... ."

You can't sue Facebook over the actions of its users.