The concept of a controlled experiment is quite important to scientific discovery and obtaining new knowledge.
What you just said is pretty equivalent to saying: When the moon is full, there is more murder. Therefore full moons must be contributing to violence. No need to theorize what happened when there's not a full moon, that's not adding any facts to the case!
> His fucking address and call for murder was shared 50,000 times.
That still doesn't mean that the medium for sharing caused the murder or is responsible for it. This is one of cases where intent and/or explicit action is required for both moral and legal culpablity - simply doing nothing may be an asshole thing to do, but it doesn't make you an accomplice in a crime, and if you do try assisting by moderating but are bad at it and fail sometimes, that's definitely not being an accomplice, because there is no duty to be perfect at that; a failure in moderation policy is just that - a failure in moderation policy, not becoming co-guilty of the too-slowly-moderated thing unless that post was kept up by someone with the explicit intent to facilitate that murder. I'd say that every single one of the 50,000 sharers is each more culpable than Meta.
Like, we have serious precedent for propagandists considered liable for inciting murderous hatred like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Nahimana and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Bosco_Barayagwiza , but the bar there is met because they actively and intentionally made the propaganda; on the other hand, all the many people who (for example) kept the radios running and/or could have somehow stopped the propagandists but didn't - well, they are not liable for the crime.
> This type of thing would not have happened in the US
That's because the real police would intervene, not because murderers are afraid of social media moderators.
That said, I do believe that if Ethiopian law enforcement can't (won't?) handle their murderous mobs, they should censor their social media until they can figure out what is going on. And foreign social media companies should cooperate with them.
Your saying that I’m missing an obvious point about the 50k shares, and I think your missing the even more obvious backdrop that this took place amidst a civil war!
Is this the only guy that died in this civil war? Did fb cause the civil war?
What you just said is pretty equivalent to saying: When the moon is full, there is more murder. Therefore full moons must be contributing to violence. No need to theorize what happened when there's not a full moon, that's not adding any facts to the case!