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slibhbyesterday at 8:20 PM2 repliesview on HN

You might as well blame this on Tim Berners-Lee. It's just absurd, a clueless way of thinking about moral responsibility.


Replies

ben_wyesterday at 8:43 PM

Before Facebook subsidised the internet in Myanmar via the internet.org initiative, only 1% of the population had internet.

The way Facebook chose to operate in the country made rumour indistinguishable from verified news by its users.

Myanmar's Facebook community was also nearly completely unmonitored by Facebook, who at the time only had two Burmese-speaking employees.

If TBL had managed to fund a huge rollout of the web, and convinced everyone that a random phpbb forum he made was filled with BBC reporters, and the defence was two full-time moderators, you can bet people would blame him if someone organised a literal genocide on that forum.

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solid_fuelyesterday at 8:48 PM

> You might as well blame this on Tim Berners-Lee.

You clearly don’t understand this, and maybe you never will (it seems beyond some people), but moral responsibility is assigned here because of the actions facebook and their employees took.

It is not assigned to Tim Berners-Lee because, again this is important, Tim Berners-Lee didn’t spend years spreading targeted genocidal propaganda in a country with a violent history and fragile peace.

Hope that helps. If you still can’t understand it, I can recommend some philosophy books on morality and our responsibilities to our fellow humans.

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