Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 52 (2020) Crime as Cognitive Constraint The applicability of Singh’s argument under the Rome Statute framework is therefore uncertain. I argue that in the case of Facebook in Myanmar, the “knowledge” and “purpose” requirements are not met. Facebook’s cross-border involvement requires neither physical presence in a host State that characterized the usual examples of corporate complicity nor a knowing act or omission on the part of the corporate officer, which could be used as basis to prosecute the corporate officer as an individual or could be used to impute knowledge to the corporate entity. Although physical proximity is not required, it is nonetheless a good indication of knowledge and purpose. In Facebook’s case, intermediary involvement is characterized by product policy and algorithmic design. As I showed in Part 1, Facebook was largely illequipped to understand, much less, review, Myanmar content during the relevant period. The platform was thus distanced from the inciter’s criminal utterance both ex-ante and ex-post. In contrast to corporate officers privy to the supply of weapons to persons most responsible for acts of genocide, there is no privity, much less purpose, in the case of the Facebook product policy manager in charge of tweaking the Community Standards, the human content moderator tasked to review and moderate content, the engineer feeding data into Facebook’s algorithms, or even Zuckerberg as controlling stockholder himself. This is not to say that social media platforms – or their owners or agents – will never possess the knowledge or purpose necessary for prosecution. There can be instances where the facts may satisfy both.232 In this regard, Singh’s creative suggestion to establish an independent alert mechanism to at least help expose corporate “knowledge” is welltaken. 233 Nonetheless, my intention is to show how criminal law is not always an adequate cognitive frame in conceptualizing corporate involvement in mass atrocity crimes. As Facebook’s role in Myanmar has shown, there are various modalities of corporate harm in mass atrocity contexts that fall through the cracks, but the fixation on perceiving harm through the lens of crime hinders other conceptual approaches. My aim here is not to displace the international criminal law regime altogether, but to question its place on the pedestal and advocate for a broader network of international liabilities that can be concurrently or alternatively pursued. 232. See, e.g., 2020 International Criminal Court Moot Court Competition Problem, International Criminal Court Moot Court Competition, http://iccmoot.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/ICCMCC-2020Problem-Final.pdf [https://perma.cc/HZD5-H4UB] (having as one of its main questions whether, on the basis of the specific facts of the hypothetical, the Defendant meets the purpose requirement under Article 25(3)(c) of the Rome Statute). 233. See Singh, supra note 227, at 340–42 (proposing an independent alert mechanism that will have “notification,” “connective,” and “accountability” functions). 182

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