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

cnn.com

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

#51

Post by jimt1234 »

This story is absolutely horrible. I feel so bad for that kid's parents. I had no idea this kinda thing was happening to dudes; I thought it was all teen girls being tricked into sending nudes, and then being extorted.

I don't know what the solution is here. However, every time I think on it, I keep coming back to parent and personal responsibility, which sounds like victim blaming. I kinda hate myself for that, but for every technical solution I can think of, I instantly think of a simple way to circumvent it. So then I wonder how to make the message stick: DON'T SEND NUDES TO ANYONE ON THE INTERNET. EVER!

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

#52

Post by fnordlord »

kenjackson wrote: post #30
BowBun wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to agree. If you're going to allow people to anonymize their identities with your tools, and further use your tools to facilitate mass crime that results in damages or loss of life, you need to be accountable for that! I think the only way out of this is a full ID verification system online, which worries me a lot for a bunch of reasons. Not sure how you de-anonymize for safety without invading privacy (the et…

You could set up a system that supports both. If you want to be verified then you opt-in and then you get a special green check by your name. And also provide a bunch of tools to allow you to filter based on the green check -- e.g., I don't allow DMs from non-green checks or don't show me any content in my feed that isn't from a green check account. So you have the option to decide how much you want to be in the anon…

I'd go even further and make DM'ing a privilege for only verified accounts.

You could anonymously read and broadcast but anything private should require personal responsibility. I don't see how this would effect ad-revenue or anything either. I imagine it would only bother bullies, trolls and scammers.

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

#53

Post by api »

jimt1234 wrote: post #51

This story is absolutely horrible. I feel so bad for that kid's parents. I had no idea this kinda thing was happening to dudes; I thought it was all teen girls being tricked into sending nudes, and then being extorted. I don't know what the solution is here. However, every time I think on it, I keep coming back to parent and personal responsibility, which sounds like victim blaming. I kinda hate myself for that, but…

There are organized "boiler room" operations doing this to kids at scale. They'll trick a kid into sending nudes or even lie and claim to have them or use AI to generate them, then will try to get the kid to steal their parents' credit cards and send money.

Today's dark forest hellscape Internet is not a safe place for young people, and it's getting worse with AI automation of scams and fraud. I wouldn't even post pics of kids online anywhere public since these can be mined to create fake AI blackmail material.

Edit: it's fraud all the way down, too. A lot of these boiler rooms use borderline or actual slave labor. The person doing the scam may not be getting anything for it at all, or might even be captive. So it's fraud perpetuated by fraud victims. At the top is usually organized crime.

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

#54

Post by theossuary »

Syonyk wrote: post #32
bandyaboot wrote: post #24

A lot of this is about parent/child relationships and making sure our kids won’t feel such a degree of shame about something like this happening that they’d resort to taking their own life, but also unless these companies have some skin in the game, they have no motivation to help combat these types of things from happening.

Likely internal opinion based on observed external actions: > Of course not. They're on the platform using it, viewing ads, aren't they? > I mean, it's a shame that some people die, because they won't be able to view ads, and the negative press might impact other people's opinion of the platform leading to potentially reduced ad view, but, heeeeeyyyyyy it's easy enough to prevent certain platform-hostile opinions fro…

It's so strange to me that HN has this view of social media, but not other things, like fast food. Fast food uses deceptive advertising and purposefully tries to get kids addicted to their product; which slowly kills them over time. But I remember HN being against sugar taxes, and other laws to help prevent it.

But for some reason social media is different? I don't see why it would be. Are the people on HN pushing for social media bans also pushing for unionization, banning pharmaceutical commercials, and preventing fast food stores in highschools? Because if they aren't it seems really hypocritical.

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

#56

Post by tcmart14 »

cafard wrote: post #47
auggierose wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody like Bezos probably just sends out hitmen after anybody trying this with him.

Not so effective when they guy trying it is the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and has demonstrated that he has quite efficient hitmen of his own.

This has the basis to being probably a pretty good action movie.

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

#58

Post by gnfargbl »

ctoth wrote: post #13
blueyes wrote: 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.

Or: you stop after you train your classifier on extortion, because society is capable of having and maintaining standards and because not every slope has to be slippery?

There are many other cases in which we allow limited intrusions into individual freedom in order to protect society. For instance, here in the UK, a police officer can enter my house without a warrant if they believe that it is necessary to facilitate an arrest for an indictable offence -- and that has been the case since at least 1984. If your way of thinking was accurate, police should now be routinely entering my house and beating confessions out of me.

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

#59

Post by giantg2 »

fasthands9 wrote: post #38
giantg2 wrote: 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.

These cases may also be effective in situations where the victim has a significant other so the release of private transcripts is not nearly "a picture of their junk". I think if you want to reduce the shame of people in situations, the absolute best thing to do is to make extortion a crime that law enforcement has the ability to prosecute forcefully. If that's the case, people who are in this situation know that the…

Extortion is already illegal and will be prosecuted, similar to sexual harassment. What else would you change?

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

#60

Post by nitwit005 »

giantg2 wrote: 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.

They'd just try a different scam.

There is always going to be ways to hurt or threaten to hurt people.

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