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He wasn't dealing them. He's not exactly culpable for the effects of his platform any more than Zuckerberg is responsible for mass hate speech coordinated by third-world dictators or Evan Spiegel for facilitating millions of nude images of children and teenagers.
Hard disagree - Zuckerberg absolutely is responsible for inadequately policing calls for genocide on his platform. Just as every social network is responsible for policing child abuse materials. Should they be punished for such content being uploaded? Of course not. They should face punishment where their wilful failure to police such content results in active harm. Facebook's utterly irresponsible behaviour in Myanmar is a great example - https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...

In the case of the Silk Road of course, it's much worse, since the platform specifically existed to facilitate illegal behaviour. I couldn't care less about the drug dealing aspect per say, but absolutely facilitating sale in these quantities with no protection from outright poisoning from contaminants is immoral. But he also sold weapons via 'the armory' https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/not-ready-silk-roads-the...

He also directly attempted to have someone murdered, which is a very serious crime in any country. The guy is not a hero. - https://www.wired.com/2015/02/read-transcript-silk-roads-bos...

I didn’t say Zuck isn’t responsible for the ills of his platform. I said DPR is no more responsible than Zuck or Spiegel. That is, that there’s a distinction between facilitating a drug deal and dealing drugs, just as there is a distinction from managing a communication platform that promotes hate speech and violence.

That distinction wasn’t recognized, and I called attention to it. And also to the fact that Eva Spiegel very strangely isn’t catching any shit whatsoever for knowingly running the nation’s most prolific child porn brokerage platform, with a product tailor-made to do so.