I'm pretty horrified by the use of Facebook and other social networks to spread all sorts of hateful stuff. Lots of horrible stuff, such as instructions for ho

I'm pretty horrified by the use of Facebook and other social networks to spread all sorts of hateful stuff. Lots of horrible stuff, such as instructions for how to kill Jews in stabbing attacks, has been spread on Facebook. That hasn't been the only factor in the recent wave of terror attacks against Israelis, but I'm sure that it has played a role. Moreover, a clever set of experiments, in which identical postings attacking Jews and Palestinians were posted on Facebook, demonstrated that the Facebook "community standards" have very little tolerance for saying bad things about Palestinians and Muslims, and a lot of tolerance for saying such things against Jews. And yet. I just don't see how this sort of lawsuit, particularly in a US court, will hold up. (I should add that I'm not a lawyer, and so forth.) Holding Facebook responsible for hateful speech -- even speech strongly encouraging people to commit horrible acts of murder against innocent civilians -- strikes me as a hard sell. And holding Facebook financially responsible for allowing such postings seems even more far-fetched. That said, the experiment that I described, in which anti-Semitic hate speech was ignored and anti-Arab/Muslim hate speech was taken down, might make Facebook liable. According to the Wikipedia article cited earlier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...), it sounds like if Facebook is monitoring, editing, or censoring posted messages, then it might be liable to some degree. In other words, perhaps Facebook is liable precisely because it does try to monitor and remove hate speech. I'm not sure, but from the little I understand, this might prove to be an important point. I agree that there is a heckuva lot of horrible, nasty, anti-Israel stuff being spread online by terror groups. Whether Facebook can or should be held liable is a different question, and I'm skeptical.