> There is a moral difference between doing and not doing that you seem to be glossing over.
Sure, I'm glossing over it, because it's not really a useful distinction for me to make in this case.
The difference between doing and not doing is that one is a deliberate criminal action, the other is negligence. Both of these things are, in various ways and in various situations, considered immoral and illegal.
The harshness of the punishment may vary, but the fact of punishment does not.
By way of analogy, if a company operates a nature preserve and invites people to walk through it and then sells licenses for other people to come and shoot at people on the preserve, and gives them lessons on how to shoot people, then that company will probably not be in business much longer.
But negligence implies an obligation to act. Did facebook have an obligation to recognize the breadth and depth of the Russian operation against the U.S.? I don't see how.
These are the questions that folks who want to see facebook suffer consequences of some kind need to address. Your argument is not made simply by pointing out that bad things happened on facebook.
You're implying the problem is Russia or that the "attack" was somehow particularly sophisticated.
It was entirely possible, using the tools Facebook provides, the way those tools are intended to be used, to do extremely unethical and illegal things without Facebook intervening.
If I run an unprotected server and allow people to execute arbitrary code on it it should be pretty clear that I was being reckless if it turns out after ten years that all this time script kiddies have been running elaborate botnets with it. Especially if the code examples I provide take users 90% of the way to doing that.
Sure, I'm glossing over it, because it's not really a useful distinction for me to make in this case.
The difference between doing and not doing is that one is a deliberate criminal action, the other is negligence. Both of these things are, in various ways and in various situations, considered immoral and illegal.
The harshness of the punishment may vary, but the fact of punishment does not.