YouTube and Reddit are sued for allegedly enabling the racist mass shooting in Buffalo that left 10 dead
YouTube and Reddit are sued for allegedly enabling the racist mass shooting in Buffalo that left 10 dead
The complementary lawsuits claim that the massacre in 2022 was made possible by tech giants, a local gun shop, and the gunman’s parents.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3320637
YouTube and Reddit are sued for allegedly enabling the racist mass shooting in Buffalo that left 10 dead::The complementary lawsuits claim that the massacre in 2022 was made possible by tech giants, a local gun shop, and the gunman’s parents.
Youtube needs to be punished for their hypocrisy.
Average Joe gets a community guidelines strike for "promoting violence" because he said "Dead" instead of "Unalived", but Penis Prager can advocate for beating your gay kids till they turn straight and YouTube just throws it into everyone's playlists without so much as a "Boys will be boys"
134I think the root of the problem is the Republican party. If you look at the language the shooter used in his manifesto, it's very very similar. There are things social media platforms can do to mitigate extremism, but people like this will continue to feel emboldened by the GOP.
122Good. Civil court is where they're most vulnerable, this is called tort law.
In criminal cases, the defendant is innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury of their peers. In a civil lawsuit, the defendant is only innocent until a judge, or jury, depending thinks they're 51% likely to be guilty, what they call the preponderance of evidence.
In other words, "probably" is good enough when you sue someone. It is not good enough if the state is trying to throw you in prison. This makes it more efficient to process the 99% of civil court cases, which are usually just dumb shit, like which of these two arguing neighbors needs to pay for having a tree on their property line cut down or something. It also results in our civil system being a very effective weapon though, as a lot of wealthier and more powerful people know pretty well.
edit for italics
edit2: If anyone doubts me you can just google "tort" and read all about our American system on wikipedia, or any number of other places.
edit3: juries in civil too.
43Feels good to be reading this somewhere other than reddit
42I mean lookingbat the details for the basis of the suit. They think they can sue someone for teaching a criminal how to do something. They think they can sue the makers of body armor for selling a guy who was not a criminal at the time of purchase, an unregulated commercial product. They think they can sue YouTube for providing motive for whatever he did.
In the law world theres a word for this. Its called a shakedown. This is grieving family's who are vindictive. They dont care who pays, but somebody has to pay in their eyes. Sadly on the merits this case will die in court pretty fast and nobody is gonna see a dollar unless alphabet and spez's lawyers decide they are feeling charitable. Which they won't because settling would cause implications of guilt in the public eye.
37It's weird that this is a link to the exact same 25 day old post on the same community.
18This is the best summary I could come up with:
YouTube, Reddit and a body armor manufacturer were among the businesses that helped enable the gunman who killed 10 Black people in a racist attack at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket, according to a pair of lawsuits announced Wednesday.
The complementary lawsuits filed by Everytown Law in state court in Buffalo claim that the massacre at Tops supermarket in May 2022 was made possible by a host of companies and individuals, from tech giants to a local gun shop to the gunman’s parents.
The lawsuit claims Mean LLC manufactured an easily removable gun lock, offering a way to circumvent New York laws prohibiting assault weapons and large-capacity magazines.
YouTube, named with parent companies Alphabet Inc. and Google, is accused of contributing to the gunman’s radicalization and helping him acquire information to plan the attack.
“We aim to change the corporate and individual calculus so that every company and every parent recognizes they have a role to play in preventing future gun violence,” said Eric Tirschwell, executive director of Everytown Law.
Last month, victims’ relatives filed a lawsuit claiming tech and social media giants such as Facebook, Amazon and Google bear responsibility for radicalizing Gendron.
The original article contains 592 words, the summary contains 192 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
13Stop blaming websites for crazy people doing crazy things.
When the Joker movie came out in 2019, everyone on CNN was saying it was going to cause mass shootings, because of that one lunatic that shot up a movie theater during a screening of "the dark knight"
The idiots who write the material for the talking heads just want to stir things up so they can get eyeballs on the screen.
I bet the outlets that were giving live coverage of the shooting showed ads every 5 minutes...like they did with that one really bad shooting.
10Our only hope for sensible gun rights is that accountability needs to be beyond just the person who pulled the trigger.
3I am all for this
2The two problems can have disproportionate sizes. Drumming up hysteria about reddit and yt is basically a distraction when you have people in public life endorsing the fringe ideas floating on these platforms.
1SUESA!
1Seems like an overreaction to me.
0I dont even use youtube anymore, i just use freetube and select the content i wanna watch by myself. Private frontends are the best. No spyware or bloated webpages or anti-adblock. Freetube even has support for external media players like mpv and vlc and smplayer and others. It even has optional tor and invidious support. Sponsorblock and Dearrow support as well.
-3I'll post this link.
We all know that there's horrible, racist shit on youtube. But it seems like you have to actively search for it before it's offered as a recommendation.
-7