First off, it is well nigh impossible for a social-media site to eliminate all unpleasant behavior, or even all criminal behavior. People send narcotics and child pornography through the mail. People arrange drug buys through the phone. But there is an expectation that social-media sites must do more.
Second, this is usually handled by assigning liability to the company, and levying fines. But criminal prosecution of executives is much more complicated. For one, it would seem that even a single violation would allow an arrest, which is extreme. But also the full weight of criminal-law evidence rules would come into play, which may make it hard to prove even a single violation.
Telegram pretty much ignored the European police. From www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/business/telegram-ceo-pavel-durov-charged.html:
But Daphne Keller, a professor of internet law
at Stanford Law School, said Mr. Durov and Telegram were conspicuously
different from major platforms such as Meta and Google, which have more
robust trust and safety teams that take down illegal content and respond
to law enforcement requests.
“I continue to assume that the reason they can indict is because Telegram
forfeited their immunity by not taking down things they were notified
about,” she said. “If that’s true, this indictment seems like a
not-surprising next step.”
But what things were they notified about? Child pornography? The above article claims "Telegram did not answer a request from the French authorities to identify one of its users in an investigation into child sexual abuse materials". That would be serious, though much less serious than refusing to take down such content. But are they even able to identify users? And why is Durov charged with "enabling the distribution of child sexual abuse material" for not identifying a user? (And how broadly should we allow the word "enabling" here? Roads, after all, "enable" highway robberies.)
The Europeans have proposed in the past a requirement that all social-media sites scan images to find matches to databases of existing child-pornography images. This has been hotly contested, to say the least.
Zuckerberg apologized to Congress for having kowtowed to the Federal government's requests for takedown of Covid "misinformation".
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/08/mark-zuckerberg-house-judiciary-letter/679657.
The Astral Codex Ten blog had a wonderful literature analysis of the question of whether ivermectin (a wormer used in dogs and horses, and in humans to treat river blindness) is effective against covid. The punchline: maybe it is, in tropical countries where most people have significant parasite loads. See www.astralcodexten.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted.
Elon pretty much ignores everybody. Both Musk and Durov have deeply held beliefs that the government should not intervene in platform content, due to free-speech rights. Durov's argument is much more convincing, since he walked away from Vkontakte in Russia due to Russian interest in surveilling users.
X (formerly Twitter) has refused even to interact with the Brazilian government, or at least with Justice Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice who is trying to purge the Internet of misinformation distributed by friends of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. Moraes has in the past ordered X to remove multiple right-wing accounts, typically without any visible due process.
What about the Brazilian demand that all VPN use be eliminated?
In a highly unusual move, Justice Moraes also said that any person in Brazil who tried to still use X via common privacy software called a virtual private network, or VPN, could be fined nearly $9,000 a day.
In other words, Justice Moraes does not really understand computing and probably shouldn't be in charge of social media.
www.nytimes.com/2024/08/30/world/americas/brazil-elon-musk-x-blocked.html.
Start with Two Justifications of Copyright
Ethical Theories
Deontological approaches to copyright
Fair Use and Music Sampling