Really the question applies to Reddit/CNN/MSNBC/WaPo

Nick Sandman was able to recover I think something like 1 Mil off of CNN for the lies they claimed about him. And that didn't lead to anyone's death. That was over a little bit of online harassment.

For the case of Charlie Kirk a death happened. The reckless behavior extended for longer. Long enough that these companies could see the impact of what they were doing more with more clarity than CNN would have been able to anticipate the consequences of what they did.

How is their culpability not greater than it was in the Nick Sandman case?

Reddit in particular has kept on mods that have encouraged this behavior of assigning false labels to people. The same thing that happened in the Nick Sandman case. Reddit works closely with the mod teams of large subs communicating regularly what it thinks is acceptable and unacceptable. Four people moderate 500 of the top subs meaning moderation is highly concentrated in the hands of people who have significant contact with Reddit's own team. And Reddit's own team had a capacity to moderate independently.

It can be shown that Reddit's moderation is often used to engineer group consensus to shut up alternate voices that would have prevented the propagation of falsehoods. When you actively promote moderators who actively suppress corrections to falsehoods your company is making an active attempt to promote and propagate falsehoods to an extent that goes beyond simply letting users have freedom of opinion.

Now I wish Nick Sandman hadn't taken the settlement. He could have gotten more. If he hadn't here would be the extra benefit. If this sort of case had been heard before in an actual court and it resulted in serious punitive damages, and then CNN despite those punitive damages continued to do the same behavior, the judge would have to consider applying 10x the punitive damages from the first time or intentionally setting them high enough to effectively shut down their operation to prevent them from doing it again.

Maybe that's why CNN did the settlement. Because they wanted to continue doing it. And if they hadn't it would be about time in 2026 for Charlie Kirk's wife to take over ownership of CNN.

I really think she should become a billionaire just to get enough punitive damages out of these people for this to stop.