[I blogged an early draft of this essay three months ago, but I've revised it extensively since then. I'd love to hear any suggestions people might have; I still have a few weeks to edit it before it's put to bed. You can also read the whole thing in a 16-page PDF.]
An entity—a landlord, a manufacturer, a phone company, a credit card company, an Internet platform, a self-driving car manufacturer—is making money off its customers' activities. Some of those customers are using the entity's services in ways that are criminal or tortious. Should the entity be held responsible, legally or morally, for its role (however unintentional) in facilitating its customers' activities? This question has famously been at the center of the debates about platform content moderation,[1] but it can come up in other contexts as well.[2]
This is a broad question, and there might be no general answer. (Perhaps it is two broad questions—one about legal responsibility and one about moral responsibility—but I think the two are connected enough to be worth discussing together.) In this essay, though, I'd like to focus on one downside of answering it "yes": What I call the Reverse Spider-Man Principle—with great responsibility comes great power.[3] Whenever we are contemplating holding entities responsible for their customers' behavior, we should think whether we want to empower such entities to surveil, investigate, and police their customers, both as to that behavior and as to other behavior.[4]
