COVID-19 Outbreak (Update: More than 2.9M cases and 132,313 deaths in US)

tomwaits said

I don't think YouTube can be sued for something like that. There is a ton of bad advice in, I would guess, hundreds of thousands of videos that could cause harm.
I think when YouTube goes into filtering content then that should increase their liability if something they didn't filter out results in harm. At that point they are telling us that they are taking out bad content, that could imply the content they didn't remove is safe.

I know a lot of this was debated when Facebook was giving depositions to Congress and they were debating if these social media sites are platforms or publishers.

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What I always tell people is that you can sue or be sued for anything. The only question is whether you or they can win. It seems like a bad case to me, but if you are as large as YouTube sometimes it doesn't matter if you win or not as the legal fees will be high no matter what. Also, probably 90% or more of the suits filed in the United States are either settled or voluntarily dismissed. Both sides usually don't want to take their chances with a jury. And, in places like Orleans Parish, it's not at all uncommon for defendants to just agree to settle for a lowish number to avoid further legal fees and/or going in front of an Orleans Parish jury.

By filtering, they can at least show that they made a good faith effort to not let out dangerous information which would likely mean they were not negligent and they stop a lot from going out on their site. If they do nothing, then it would be evidence that they ignored something dangerous that they should have known. And knew or should have know is usually the first step to a case for negligence.