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I don't think mens rea is particularly relevant when it comes to the actions of corporations. It's not at all clear to me what it would mean for a corporation

I don't think mens rea is particularly relevant when it comes to the actions of corporations. It's not at all clear to me what it would mean for a corporation to have intent. We could certainly say a 'corporation intended' to do something if we found an email from the CEO commanding it, that much is trivial. But what if we think of a corporation as a 'slow AI' or 'China brain'? Might the corporation, viewed that way, have intent that transcends the individual thoughts and desires of the constituent employees? The system may be structured in a way that rewards low level employees for doing things the individual executives would never consider acceptable (for instance, 'lying to the executives'), and which the low level employees don't think is a good idea either. With all the humans personally opposed to some business practice, it might still occur due to the structure of the system. If we personify that system, we could perhaps say the system itself has a will of its own, with objectives alien to any of the humans involved. A harsh example far worse than Facebook: the Functionalism-Intentionalism debate (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism–intentionalism_debate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism–intentionalism...) At the end of the day, does it really matter? Whether you subscribe to functionalism or intentionalism in that case, the horrible end result is the same and people need to be held accountable for it.

throwawaygh 6y ago
> I don't think mens rea is particularly relevant when it comes to the actions of corporations. It's not at all clear to me what it would mean for a corporation to have intent. But we do distinguish in regulated engineering disciplines. A contractor that intentionally uses shoddy materials in a bridge or tunnel is treated differently from a contractor who simply fails to implement legally required QC is treated different from a contractor who implemented legally required QC but laid bad concrete due to operator error that wasn't captured by that legal requirement. > At the end of the day, does it really matter? Yes, and the reason it matters is immediate when you try to answer the following questions. > Whether you subscribe to functionalism or intentionalism in that case, the horrible end result is the same and people need to be held accountable for it. 1. Held accountable how? 2. Toward what end? -- Facebook has good engineers, but they're not gods. It is not possible to write a perfect -- or perhaps even passably good -- "political extremism" filter. Shifting blame from "the algorithm" to "the engineers" or "the corporation" completely misses the whole fucking point: there is no spec for "perfectly functional political extremism filter". 0.000% of the people calling for "politically neutral moderation" have any god damn clue how to define the thing that are asking for, even in a natural language, let alone a language precise enough to implement. Just look at the rhetoric used. People blame in passive voice "corporations" and "engineers", while criticizing others for using passive voice to blame "the algorithm". I'm not saying that we don't need a base level of QC and corporate responsibility. I even think Software people should be folded into Professional Engineering with all of the personal responsibility that entails! But we need to be very realistic about the fact that engineers are not Gods who can Solve Politics. Hell, even if you erase inherent political tension this is still an impossible task. Can you write down a filter that's perfectly biased toward liberal speech? No. So, again, Held accountable how? Toward what end? Unless your answer is "purposefully kill all social media including HN", mens rea matters.
- stretchcat 6y ago
  > 1. Held accountable how? 2. Toward what end? In the case of the Nazis, the answers are 1. Executed. 2. Justice. For Facebook, I think executions should be off the table, but the second answer is the same. Facebook's engineers aren't gods, I get that. Knowing their engineers aren't gods, Facebook proceeded to use them to create imperfect but profitable systems anyway. Systems they knew or should have known would harm society while enriching their shareholders. This is facebook's crime. If they couldn't create moderation systems that operate well at a massive scale, they never should have operated at that scale in the first place. They couldn't, should have known they couldn't, but tried anyway.
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    Again, I view this as a passive voice excusing of responsibility for direct political action in exactly the same way that some people view "the algorithm" as a passive voice excusing of responsibility. The president pro tempore of the US senate was a Segrationist in 2001. Literally, segregationists of the US Senate outlived pets.com If any component of your blame or solution to the state of western politics includes the words "social media", ... good fucking luck.
    - stretchcat 6y ago
      > Again, I view this as a passive voice excusing of responsibility for direct political action You are mistaken. Neither intentionalists nor functionalists excuse the responsibility of anybody, least of all the organization's leadership. To both, the organization and its leaders are to be held responsible for the actions of the organization. The functionalist model does not absolve anybody of guilt. If you want to see the hazard of demanding proof of intention, look no further than the travesty of justice that occurred in the wake of Enron. Every last Enron executive should have been jailed, but prosecutors had a hell of a time getting any of them convicted of anything because of this misguided obsession with proving intent. And nobody from Arthur Anderson went to prison, for the same reason. Obsession with intent allows the guilty to trot out the "we didn't mean for this to happen, we're all just idiots." excuse. Without a smoking gun email, that excuse is hard to conclusively disprove. The antidote to that is strict liability; saying that their intentions are irrelevant and punishing them anyway. Reminder, this is my point: "When software goes wrong, the company that decided to create and operate that software for profit is responsible for whatever negative impact that software might have, regardless of whether these problems were foreseen."

throwawaygh 6y ago

> I don't think mens rea is particularly relevant when it comes to the actions of corporations. It's not at all clear to me what it would mean for a corporation to have intent. But we do distinguish in regulated engineering disciplines. A contractor that intentionally uses shoddy materials in a bridge or tunnel is treated differently from a contractor who simply fails to implement legally required QC is treated different from a contractor who implemented legally required QC but laid bad concrete due to operator error that wasn't captured by that legal requirement. > At the end of the day, does it really matter? Yes, and the reason it matters is immediate when you try to answer the following questions. > Whether you subscribe to functionalism or intentionalism in that case, the horrible end result is the same and people need to be held accountable for it. 1. Held accountable how? 2. Toward what end? -- Facebook has good engineers, but they're not gods. It is not possible to write a perfect -- or perhaps even passably good -- "political extremism" filter. Shifting blame from "the algorithm" to "the engineers" or "the corporation" completely misses the whole fucking point: there is no spec for "perfectly functional political extremism filter". 0.000% of the people calling for "politically neutral moderation" have any god damn clue how to define the thing that are asking for, even in a natural language, let alone a language precise enough to implement. Just look at the rhetoric used. People blame in passive voice "corporations" and "engineers", while criticizing others for using passive voice to blame "the algorithm". I'm not saying that we don't need a base level of QC and corporate responsibility. I even think Software people should be folded into Professional Engineering with all of the personal responsibility that entails! But we need to be very realistic about the fact that engineers are not Gods who can Solve Politics. Hell, even if you erase inherent political tension this is still an impossible task. Can you write down a filter that's perfectly biased toward liberal speech? No. So, again, Held accountable how? Toward what end? Unless your answer is "purposefully kill all social media including HN", mens rea matters.

stretchcat 6y ago
> 1. Held accountable how? 2. Toward what end? In the case of the Nazis, the answers are 1. Executed. 2. Justice. For Facebook, I think executions should be off the table, but the second answer is the same. Facebook's engineers aren't gods, I get that. Knowing their engineers aren't gods, Facebook proceeded to use them to create imperfect but profitable systems anyway. Systems they knew or should have known would harm society while enriching their shareholders. This is facebook's crime. If they couldn't create moderation systems that operate well at a massive scale, they never should have operated at that scale in the first place. They couldn't, should have known they couldn't, but tried anyway.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  Again, I view this as a passive voice excusing of responsibility for direct political action in exactly the same way that some people view "the algorithm" as a passive voice excusing of responsibility. The president pro tempore of the US senate was a Segrationist in 2001. Literally, segregationists of the US Senate outlived pets.com If any component of your blame or solution to the state of western politics includes the words "social media", ... good fucking luck.
  - stretchcat 6y ago
    > Again, I view this as a passive voice excusing of responsibility for direct political action You are mistaken. Neither intentionalists nor functionalists excuse the responsibility of anybody, least of all the organization's leadership. To both, the organization and its leaders are to be held responsible for the actions of the organization. The functionalist model does not absolve anybody of guilt. If you want to see the hazard of demanding proof of intention, look no further than the travesty of justice that occurred in the wake of Enron. Every last Enron executive should have been jailed, but prosecutors had a hell of a time getting any of them convicted of anything because of this misguided obsession with proving intent. And nobody from Arthur Anderson went to prison, for the same reason. Obsession with intent allows the guilty to trot out the "we didn't mean for this to happen, we're all just idiots." excuse. Without a smoking gun email, that excuse is hard to conclusively disprove. The antidote to that is strict liability; saying that their intentions are irrelevant and punishing them anyway. Reminder, this is my point: "When software goes wrong, the company that decided to create and operate that software for profit is responsible for whatever negative impact that software might have, regardless of whether these problems were foreseen."