Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 52 (2020) Crime as Cognitive Constraint infrastructure owner are split between two actors. State and citizen are both reduced to platform users, and the intermediary curates the message imparted and received. Curation is facilitated by organizing user content to be made more visible to other users, 225 in line with the platform’s Community Standards and deployed through algorithmic design. Thus, on top of being spoken, incitement is also necessarily coded by a third party in order to be publicly communicated. Such third party is distanced from the content producer physically but also mentally, thus negating knowledge and purpose of the criminal design. This distinguishes platforms from traditional media (journalist, broadcaster, publisher): platforms are not privy to the production of content and do not claim it as their own. In contrast, a journalist who writes an article and the publisher who decides to run it both exercise ownership over the act of communication. Well-aware of the challenges of prosecuting social media platforms as publishers and broadcasters for incitement to genocide, Shannon Raj Singh alternatively proposes to extend aiding and abetting liability to social media platforms by comparing them to weapons suppliers.226 Citing cases from the ICTY, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the Zyklon B poison gas case (collectively, “ad hoc tribunals”), Singh argues that complicity is “well-suited” because there is no need for intent to commit the crime, only “knowledge of the end use of [the company’s] products.” 227 A significant constraint of this thesis is its reliance on the assumption that the mens rea for aiding and abetting only requires knowledge, which was adopted in the ad hoc tribunals but not at the ICC. 228 As Singh admits, aiding and abetting liability under Article 25(3)(c) of the Rome Statute requires a stricter standard – “purpose” to facilitate the commission of the crime, rather than mere knowledge that the act will assist in its commission. 229 However, there was no discussion of how the Rome Statute framework would alter her analysis. Although using Myanmar’s incitement landscape as a case study, Singh did not conclude that, based on her theory, Facebook can be prosecuted for its role in Myanmar’s incitement landscape. 230 Rather, she used the Facebook dilemma to argue that aiding and abetting liability can be useful “for future scenarios.” 231 225. See CUSTODIANS OF THE INTERNET, supra note 25, at 41. 226. See Shannon Raj Singh, Move Fast and Break Societies: The Weaponization of Social Media and Options for Accountability Under International Criminal Law 331, 8 CAMBRIDGE INT’L L. J. 331 (2019). 227. Id. at 336. 228. Id. at 334 n. 12. 229. See id. 230. See id. at 336. 231. Id. 181

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