I don't know what the right answer is but as far as analogies go the phone companies don't decide which calls you get and which of your incoming calls/texts to make a priority.
Twitter and certainly Facebook do run algorithms that decide which of the 300 things the 1000 people you friended or follow should be displayed and in what order so they get decide what to emphasize as important by deciding what you see first and even what you see at all.
In order to be the same as the phone company they'd have to give you the entire feed of every person you follow in chronological order, no filtering.
I suppose one solution for them. They could default to no filtering and let users turn on filters. Then it would be the user's choosing the filters, not them. I'm not sure what scrutiny the filters themselves would need.
A simple filter like "show nothing with the word 'poop' in it" would seem safe. A complex filter like "let this ML algo decide for me" I have no idea.
The problem is that right now these big Internet companies aren't "dumb pipes" like phone companies--they are moderating content already, so either they shouldn't moderate at all or they should accept responsibility for how they moderate. If they're making money by persecuting certain groups or enabling child porn or whatever, they should be held accountable. If they're just dumb pipes, then that's fine, but they mustn't moderate content.
I don't think it's so cut and dried. For instance, if you sell a defective gun, and that gun kills the shooter instead of the target, you can certainly be assigned responsibility. Liability doesn't end when something is in someone else's hands. Selling something you know is dangerous, than you know can harm, brings with it is own liability -- contaminated lettuce for instance.
There are a number of implied warranties made when a transaction occurs. [1]
American gun manufacturers, like pretty much any other manufacturer, can indeed be sued if their product is defective. For example: Remington has caught a lot of heat for defective triggers in their Model 700 series rifles.
When people say American gun manufacturers can't be sued, they're talking about the PLCAA, which shields gun manufacturers from lawsuits concerning guns they made being used in crimes. The PLCAA does not prevent them from being sued for defective products.
>American gun manufacturers, like pretty much any other manufacturer, can indeed be sued if their product is defective.
The parent is explicitly calling out that gun manufacturers can be sued for defects in the product, and as such the idea that manufacturer liability ends after they have sold the product is patently false.
So if a gun manufacturer did keep control over their gun, like with an electronic targeting system making decisions on behalf of the user[0], by the control argument, wouldn't they then have a responsibility to make sure it's used appropriately?
[0]: https://www.tracking-point.com/ (Yeah it's an aftermarket product, but for argument's sake, let's say it was 1st party)
You really misunderstand the tracking-point platform. It's a holdover system to calculate windage and drop on a moving target locally on the system, not some kind of visual analysis engine that does target determination.
It provides "Hey, you need this much windage" not a shoot/no-shoot decision. It's also entirely on-system so the customer owns it, it's not running somewhere in the cloud.