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A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide
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Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide
#72> 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.
I had a "son" WhatsApp scammer I took for a chat gpt ride. The "father" wouldn't send money cause the son was an addict. Sleezy scumbag happily pressed along promising rehab, sun and moon.
Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide
#73Maybe 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 have been some high profile cases of people standing up to similar scams, including Bezos. It (standing up to bullies - edit: extortionists is a better characterization than bully) is commendable behvaior and needs to be better publicized as such, hopefully it will make some people feel more comfortable doing the same.
Standing up to bullies is the kind of thing that gets young people expelled from school. Something about those zero tolerance policies. We're teaching our kids to be helpless. The only option we give them is to appeal to authority and it absolutely fucks them over when they're involved in a situation because of their own choices.
Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fo…
That is such a terrible equivalence, I don't even know where to start.
Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could all agree that you get forgiven for anything publicized by a blackmailer.
So kind of like getting rid of puritanical moral standards across society? There are some things people deserve to feel shame for (basically anything you intentionally do that hurts other people). Having junk between your legs is not one of those things. Ditto for 99% of the other things people get blackmailed for.
That's a start, but I think it may take more than that.
Many discussions here about freedom of speech and the value of anonymity to this; the freedom to express ideas without worrying it may explode in our faces later.
I think right-leaning people use "cancel culture" to describe the same category of concerns. At lest, I hope that's what they mean by the term.
Business and governments say similar things, saying that if every meeting is recorded, people will be less willing to speak up.
A society where we don't care about people having had dumb opinions in the past would help more… but that creates a game theoretic risk, we need some kind of reputation system to avoid the iterated prisoners' dilemma degenerating into the ordinary prisoners' dilemma.
I don't have any complete answers. But at the same time, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, we can certainly make things better.
Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide
#76A 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.
And what exactly are they supposed to do? Monitor all private communications?
At that scale you would need an AI. Once the AI sees something possibly bad, either you have a real person check it (people would complain about privacy, the mental health of those employees having to see awful things) or you have the AI ban (people would complain about lost accounts)
No matter what instagram does they lose. So I think doing nothing is the right thing. Maybe the parent should have done some parenting.
Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could all agree that you get forgiven for anything publicized by a blackmailer.
So kind of like getting rid of puritanical moral standards across society? There are some things people deserve to feel shame for (basically anything you intentionally do that hurts other people). Having junk between your legs is not one of those things. Ditto for 99% of the other things people get blackmailed for.
[deleted]
Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fo…
For one, HN isn't a monolith. There are plenty of people on here who agree and disagree on each of the topics you listed. On the topic of social media, I think that there is a widespread belief that we could have tools that give us the social benefits of social media without including all of the toxic manipulative tracking and algorithmic feeds. Unfortunately the market has become dominated by a few maximally greedy…
'...doesn't have a clear solution.'
So what are some tools we have available to remove the profit motive from this situation?
Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide
#79Surely the real problem here, to my non-American eyes, is having easy access to a firearm, no?
Pretty easy to hang yourself too.
Re: A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide
#80A 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…
(If you're borrowing from Nadsat here, I believe it would properly be "appy polly loggy".)