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A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide

cnn.com

11–20 of 135 posts

Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide

#11
post #2

Maybe if we weren't so puritanical, this would be less of an issue. So you have a picture of my junk? Ok... nobody wants it and it isn't worth anything. Should I be embarrassed that I have something 50% of other humans have? It'd be interesting to see the differences int his sort of crime in more open cultures.

There are other forms of extortion or they could make something up. Are you saying that extortion would be impossible in a non-puritanical society?

Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide

#12

> After his death, the scammers sent Guffey a laughing face emoji and a message using a pseudo account on Instagram after the original one was shut down. “It said, ‘did I tell you your son begged for his life?’” Guffey says. They also demanded money in exchange for the photos. I wish there was a special prison for these types of people. Jesus Christ.

Con artists seem to often have a psychopathy that even a lot of violent criminals don't possess.

Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide

#13
post #7

It's would be trivially easy to scan these streams of messages through some kind of ML classifier and identify cases of extortion before they result in suicide. Once the platforms identify the perps, they can block them from the platform. I hope this lawsuit makes the costs of platform inaction so high that they build out detection systems.

I can't believe you are actively suggesting this. Even in this horrific case.

Okay, so you train your classifier on extortion. Then you train it to detect sexual content. Then you train it to detect potential piracy. Then you train it to detect wrongthink. Then you don't have a free society anymore.

Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide

#14
I'm curious what efforts have gone into finding these scammers? Any? I might be wrong but I can't imagine them having great OPSEC, especially if they are accepting payment through venmo...probably a hacked account, but they would try to get the cash out of the hacked account in some manner which would help target them.

Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide

#15
post #2

Maybe if we weren't so puritanical, this would be less of an issue. So you have a picture of my junk? Ok... nobody wants it and it isn't worth anything. Should I be embarrassed that I have something 50% of other humans have? It'd be interesting to see the differences int his sort of crime in more open cultures.

There are other forms of extortion or they could make something up. Are you saying that extortion would be impossible in a non-puritanical society?

That is clearly not what they are saying.

Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide

#16
post #2

Maybe if we weren't so puritanical, this would be less of an issue. So you have a picture of my junk? Ok... nobody wants it and it isn't worth anything. Should I be embarrassed that I have something 50% of other humans have? It'd be interesting to see the differences int his sort of crime in more open cultures.

Maybe or maybe not. Don’t blame the victims please. I’m not from a puritan environment at all but when I was a teenager I had low self esteem. I believe I could have been an easy victim back then.

It isn't blaming the victim to have a candid conversation around how society and individuals can or could be more resilient. This is how progress happens.

For example, we often educate children to set boundaries and tell adults about unwanted sexual advances. That doesn't mean that children who failed to set boundaries and tell adults deserve to be molested. .

Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide

#17
post #2

Maybe if we weren't so puritanical, this would be less of an issue. So you have a picture of my junk? Ok... nobody wants it and it isn't worth anything. Should I be embarrassed that I have something 50% of other humans have? It'd be interesting to see the differences int his sort of crime in more open cultures.

I have wondered if generative AI will make this less of an issue. Victims won't be as afraid of images leaking out if they can plausibly claim that they're fakes.

Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide

#18
post #2

Maybe if we weren't so puritanical, this would be less of an issue. So you have a picture of my junk? Ok... nobody wants it and it isn't worth anything. Should I be embarrassed that I have something 50% of other humans have? It'd be interesting to see the differences int his sort of crime in more open cultures.

Maybe or maybe not. Don’t blame the victims please. I’m not from a puritan environment at all but when I was a teenager I had low self esteem. I believe I could have been an easy victim back then.

I'm not blaming the victim, rather the societal views that enabled this (in part). I too had some body insecurity at that age, but more societal openness would have likely reduced that.

Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide

#19
post #2

Maybe if we weren't so puritanical, this would be less of an issue. So you have a picture of my junk? Ok... nobody wants it and it isn't worth anything. Should I be embarrassed that I have something 50% of other humans have? It'd be interesting to see the differences int his sort of crime in more open cultures.

It does not necessarily need to be picture of anyone's junk. It does not need even to be a picture. So let's focus on the real issue here. Puritanism or whatever, extortion needs to be impossible.

Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide

#20
post #7

It's would be trivially easy to scan these streams of messages through some kind of ML classifier and identify cases of extortion before they result in suicide. Once the platforms identify the perps, they can block them from the platform. I hope this lawsuit makes the costs of platform inaction so high that they build out detection systems.

Why stop with messages? We have so much more information on people these days than chat history. Why not feed all of it into some kind of opaque classifier that can give us "grades" of human being. Then we could shadowban people below a certain grade from social media commons to keep scum like this out. Doesn't that sound like a fantastic society???
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