Complicity of Social Media Companies in Inciting Genocide Hakim against the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazi Party shocked a universal conscience.32 As the International Military Tribunal (IMT) sought to prosecute the Nazis for their crimes against humanity, scholars and world leaders coalesced around a particular theory of “genocide.” Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer and the Genocide Convention’s primary drafter, coined the phrase genocide “combining geno-, from the Greek word for race or tribe, with -cide, from the Latin word for killing.”33 Matthew Lippman writes that “[a]ccording to Lemkin, genocide involved a two phase process, the destruction of the ‘national pattern of the oppressed group’ and the ‘imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.’”34 Genocide was thus conceived as a system-wide offense, a sociological restructuring whereby institutions of power, ranging from government to media, are weaponized to will the destruction of a particular group over time and in multiple stages. In converting genocide from a theory to a crime, the international community understood the magnitude of the offense. The Genocide Convention preamble captured a universal sentiment, characterizing genocide as a crime that “inflicted great losses on humanity” and demanding international cooperation “to liberate mankind from such an odious scourge.”35 The parties criminalized genocide in Articles I and II of the Genocide Convention, which provide: Article I: The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish. Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.36 32 33 34 35 36 See Matthew Lippman, The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: Fifty Years Later, 15 ARIZ. J. INT’L & COMP. L. 415, 452 (1998) (“The drafting of the Genocide Convention was profoundly influenced by the Holocaust and the Cold War. There was tension between the desire to condemn the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany and the aspiration to craft a convention which was sufficiently expansive to anticipate and prevent future acts of genocide.”). United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, What Is Genocide?, http://perma.cc/3E6M-SYP8. Lippman, supra note 32, at 423. Genocide Convention, supra note 31, at pmbl. Id. at arts. I-II. Summer 2020 89