Yes. Judges aren’t experts on 99% of the shit they rule on.
Once we’re in a world where a judge gets to make product decisions, bad things are going to happen.
Judges have had this ability since common law was created ~700 years ago. They’ve always been able to dictate how shit goes down. Meta can shut down if they don’t like it.
Judges are not product designers. Judges are not trust & safety experts. Judges are not child safety experts. They do not understand how all these things work together. They do not understand the tradeoffs of their decisions.
Arguably, neither does Meta. Or alternatively, they do understand perfectly and have intentionally made malicious decisions, forcing the judge into the position of taking those decisions away from them.
We need some kind of third-party oversight group that has enforcement powers, but is somehow immune to corporate influence, goverent overreach, and religious fundamentalism.
I dunno, I think judges are more likely to be “child safety experts” than private companies with a history of doing the worst thing possible to all their users (absolutely including children).
I wonder who they consider to be a “child safety expert” and how much their definition is a no true Scotsman fallacy.
You uh … ever heard of the school-to-prison pipeline? Judges throughout the country have repeatedly been caught literally selling kids to private prisons. Look at what Britney Spears went through and tell me the US judiciary knows-best.
The judge could have turned the matter to experts. He didn’t.
Don’t get me wrong, I know the judicial system is pretty flawed, but their job is to rule on behalf of people’s wellbeing, at least in the United States. The reason the school-to-prison pipeline even exists is due to pressure from for-profits similar to Facebook.
I do agree that it would be better for a judge to turn to an expert opinion in this kind of case, and to avoid lobbyist and corporate groups, specifically.
(And FWIW after I made my first comment did I realize that the author of this article is Mike Masnick, who is an advocate for social networks because he is employed by one.)
Yeah, the article’s agenda is pretty overt. End of the day, I don’t care about a corporations “rights” being violated, but this judge had the opportunity to do right by the public and set a precedent, and instead opted to shit all over it.
Wouldn’t be surprised if he’s actually unhappy with the jury’s verdict, seeing as he’s playing the “anti-corpo big-government over-reach” character to a tee.
