It sounds like commercial bribery, which is illegal in most states. Sometimes the federal mail and wire fraud statues are also used to prosecute such things.
Yes. For taking money/profiting. They didn't do it just it by 'mistake', or by incompetence.
How do you think mafia operates in Italy? They infiltrate their solders in every part of the government (especially local government), or even private companies where they have interests.
In this specific case, you might be able to throw in conspiracy to violate the CFAA.
Using new laws:
I would be perfectly happy to have a "corporate espionage/bribery" law that made it criminal to accept money personally to change your behavior as an agent of a company. I would prefer it if that law only applied when you and the company opted into it via a contract to minimize disruption to any existing schemes where that is considered acceptable behavior.
Until of course being hired by competition is seen as "corporate espionage" and you've suddenly made a noncompete something that is built in to every employment. Somehow we've succeeded in making the US even more dystopic.
> when drafting the law basic care needs to be taken
You are right, and this was more or less my point. Drafting a law is hard work - but the kind of handwaving armchair advice that you often see to "just make a law for this" does not recognise that it is very hard to do so. It's even harder to do it in a way that is right for everyone and with the political landscape being the way it is and lobbying working the way it does it's far from a foregone conclusion that such an effort will yield the desired result.
I want a law that would make Facebook liable for the actions of their staff. The goal of such a law would push the company to implement measures to make individual bad actors have very little power to do bad things. In this case, simply having a requirement that several independent people (maybe in different offices) review a case before unbanning an account wouldn't be completely unreasonable.
> simply having a requirement that several independent people
You're asking for government mandated bureaucracy.
Here's how I've seen this play out in the context of the world's largest bureaucracy, the Department of Defense.
Let's say the law requires someone in a powerful position, like a VP, to approve the un-ban request so you can hold someone "accountable". The following chain of events will occur:
1. The VP will be inundated with un-ban requests and become increasingly annoyed at requests that should obviously remain in effect.
2. The VP will delegate a subordinate to check that each request is sufficiently nuanced to require the full attention of the VP.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 until you reach a management level that's too over-burdened to add another review layer. You should have 2-4 layers of review at this point.
To properly route a request, each layer queues the request and runs some cheap processing and sends it up the chain where the process repeats. We can borrow some concepts from networking to model this process:
- buffer bloat: queues are typically unbounded in the real world. Requests are rarely dropped. Instead they accumulate.
- back pressure: the VP goes on vacation. All requests will pile up at the previous layer.
- latency: certain days have exceptionally high latency, notably Saturday, Sunday, and most parts of Friday.
- network partitions: often the transport layer (usually an intern to shuffle paperwork) will become unavailable as the scheduler (boss) repurposes the intern to higher priority tasks.
With a bit of tuning, a well-established bureaucracy can increase latency from minutes to months per request.
I’d want that extended to include joint responsibility of the highest level employees who were aware of criminal acts or fraud. After all the common refrain justifying huge incomes for high level employees/execs/board members is the “risk” in their jobs.
That risk should include personal responsibility. As long as the only people who suffer meaningfully are normal ICs, customers, and small shareholders there’s no actual reason for the boards to change behavior. Fines are passed on as increased costs (PG&E), reduced wages (every company), etc - I’m sure once individual executives can be sent to jail for allowing criminal acts the behaviour will change. (Until they buy a law to remove their liability)
It seems like every couple of weeks we see a founder or professional locked out of their accounts on some platform they depend on to make a living. Until that problem is solved I don't think we want to make it harder than it is to unban someone.
Likely the bad actors would still find a way around it, too. What's a little criminal collusion amongst coworkers for profit.
I mean there’s a real problem in that many people are arranging their livelihoods around single platforms.
As much as I hate crowder for example, he ensured that most of his income comes from advertising his own store and products, so being demonetized for repeatedly violating YT policies didn’t actually cost him much.
The corporation itself is avoiding any culpability or liability for the offence, enacted by its staff, on its systems, through its capabilities, in its name. And to its (partial) benefit. By virtue of its own failed or abesent oversight and detection mechanisms.
The phrase "corporate veil" is a metaphor describing how someone or something is getting away with something by hiding behind the corporation they are part of. Like, the corporation is acting as a veil, over whoever is responsible.
Business corporation generally is a risk avoidance structure.
What the "corporate veil" generally protects are investors -- only the actual amount invested is at risk, rather than more, or all, of an investor's assets.
The veil can also be used to shield specific executives, another common complaint.
But a third mode is when a sacrificial scapegoat, often relatively low on the hierarchy, is identified and blamed for problems. That shows up in government as well as the "one bad apple" excuse, which both fails to address true accountability and justice, and massacres the metaphore, which is "one bad apple spoils the barrel".
A lone actor should not be able to behave in such a manner, and is quite probably not acting alone. The oversight, detection, and cross-checks which should be required to be in place clearly aren't. That would include the individual's business unit and management chain, as well as the company as a whole.
Note that I didn't use the term "corporate veil", and I'm not entirely certain it applies here (see one definition: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/corporate-veil....), though in the sense of shielding the larger part of the corporation and individuals within it, the argument could be made.
Understanding business as a sort of "risk shedding engine" may help. The corporate veil is one mechanism for this, but another is the creation (or post-incident assignment of) what's effectively an ablative heat shield -- some component of the corporate structure, often a single individual, up to and including a CEO, though business units, subsidiaries, contractors, or largely-controlled corporate charities and trade organisations are also used -- which can be shed or discarded as needed.
So the "turnaround CEO", the management consultant organisation, the "rogue employee" (anywhere from the front line to the executive suite), the subsidiary, the spin-off, the "charity" or "trade organisation", all fit this bill.
For CEOs, see Albert "Chainsaw Al" John Dulap (obituary: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/obituaries/al-dunlap-dead...), or Martin "Pharma Bro" Skrelli. An argument could be made that many major politicians operate in this mode -- the argument might be made for a Boris Johnson, Mitchell McConnell, Fritz "The Senator from Disney" Hollings, who serve as the public exposure of their respective interest groups. "Trade organisations", particularly with an enforcement arm, such as the MPAA, RIAA, and BSA, largely represent firms in the cinema, music recording, and software industries, respectively. Various "think tanks" such as those in the Atlas Network (https://www.atlasnetwork.org/partners) allow specific interests, usually business, industrial, and generally the wealthy, to engage in activities at a slight distance. Many of the Atlas partner organisations are strongly associated with the Kochs, Scaifes, Bradley, Searle, Walton, DeVos, and others. (See: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Atlas_Networkhttps://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=State_Policy_Net..., and related articles.)
In this case, Facebook are avoiding corporate liability, legal risk, and goodwill erosion by blaming a "rogue employee". That strikes me as an incomplete fault analysis, and one that's overtly and obviously self-serving to Facebook, its management, and shareholdes. Most of which are synonymous with Mark Zuckerberg.
See related: Fujitsu's involvement in the UK Post Office's highly-flawed "Horizon" accounting system, responsible for destroying multiple lives and careers over two decades:
In an effort to make sense of the phrase, what you are saying seems to boil down to "it's a veil as in the veil is protecting the investors". Who thinks the root cause was a conspiracy among the shareholders of FB?
That's not quite what I'm saying. Or possibly more accurately, I don't think that's what I'm saying.
1. I'm still working through my thoughts on this.
2. The key point is not "corporate veil" but "legal and operational concept of corporate structure as a risk externalisation engine".
Under that second, the "corporate veil" is a part, but not all, of the externalisation mechanism. And would make the short response to your reframing: "No".
More subtly, it's not essentially necessary for the externalisation to be a deliberate strategy -- a conspiracy -- though that probably is often the case. There are emergent phenomena a and behaviours, and given that risk externalisation is, in both the short and medium terms, generally, profitable (that is, it decreases costs and increases revenues), there's a natural self-selection among firms, managers, and behaviours toward such structures and behaviours, and those who follow them, consciously or not.
If you're looking at specific legal or risk concepts, you'll probably want to examine the notions of moral and morale hazard, attractive nuisance, negligence, malfeasance, and the like. The notions of willful ignorance and motivated reasoning as well.
These issues get less play than they should, and comprise a major weakness to the market-capitalist model. Though of course they're also present in other organisational models of central control. Organisational models which are immune or resistant to centralisation and concentrations of power, ownership, and/or control would probably fare better, though these are difficult to arrive at and sustain.
The reason this challenges the general notions of markets includes both generally understood principles, and possibly some that are novel, or at least less considered:
- The correspondence between wealth and power, best captured in Smith's uncharacteristically suscinct quip in Wealth of Nations: "Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power."
- The dual problems of principle-agent and regulatory capture. Though often viewed independently, I see these as largely the private- and public-sector variants of the same underlying behaviour: individuals acting for personal gain rather than institutional benefit. Corruption generally.
- Classic informational asymmetries: At a given point in time, two (or more) agents having unequal amounts of information concerning a transaction or state of offairs. Akerloff, "The Market for Lemons".
- Temporal informational asymmetries: The development of fuller understanding, particularly as concerns unforseen consequences, emergent phenomena, or latent (as opposed to manifest) properties or aspects, over time, to all agent (though also often with an imbalance between agents). Robert K. Merton, etc.
- The risk-immunity of size. If an organisation has both resources and cost or operational structures to survive negative circumstances, then in a period of contraction, less-capable organisations will fail whilst the larger survive. Size does not always correspond to the capacity to absorb risks, but often does.
- Motivated asset inflation or value assurance. The tendency of those holding some valuable or income-generating property or system, to seek to further appreciate its value in ways that reduce social wealth growth. Bernhard J. Stern's "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations" (1937), and NIMBYism, are key examples.
- Various blame- and liability-shifting practices, including as described above. NDAs, non-competes, anti-poaching practices, and the like, would be others.
- Practices generally seen as immoral, unethical, or illegal: coercion, product bundling and tying, exclusive dealing, product dumping, and the like.
Sorry that's not a short answer, though I feel it's more accurate.
This isn't anything but the company firing someone for their own reasons.
The issue at hand is a) us knowing that fraud was perpetrated and b) appropriate jurisdictions being able to try that individual for fraudulent actions.
Neither is present today. Facebook polices its own employees and if those employees were important enough you'd bet they would not release that information nor hold those employees accountable.
How about more preventive measures rather than just reactionary ones? Maybe stronger security measures that make it much harder if not physically impossible for one person to do much damage in the first place?
As for prosecution (whether civil or criminal) - I don't know, if there's a law that can enforce it, should that not be on the table? And if there isn't, then perhaps there should be?
