Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 135 posts

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

#101

Post by arp242 »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #100
arp242 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they track this down to some guy in Russia. Then what? Tracking down these types of criminals is probably the least effective things law enforcement could be doing because it's quite time-consuming and a lot of the time it gives you no concrete result.

I am not confident that 100% of these instances are "some guy in russia". Is it true that these scammers in question were? Or that LEO tracked them down at all ? Or did anything meaningful? I agree that we ask LEOs to enforce the law, and doing so is a lot of work. There is, though, quite a large discrepancy between what we ask them to do, and what they do, so it remains to be seen if they are doing a lot of work, an…

It's not 100%, no, that's why I used "a lot" and not "all".

And even if they are in the US, it's not that hard to be reasonable untrackable with minimal skills. People make mistakes, and maybe every now and then you might catch one person. Whoop-die-doo. It's just not effective or reasonable to track down every single case in depth.

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

#102

Post by tibbydudeza »

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.

I reckon the son was gay hence the sextortion and his dad political leanings is probably to the right which regards being gay to be worse than being on social welfare.

From his website - yep called it.

"Brandon Guffey is an unapologetic conservative who shares our passion for faith, family, freedom and life."

He is clearly deflecting the blame here.

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

#103

Post by giantg2 »

busterarm wrote: post #98
giantg2 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. "Standing up to bullies is the kind of thing that gets young people expelled from school. Something about those zero tolerance policies." So it's not really the standing up part but the policy that gets them expelled.

Rigid, uncaring administrative bodies can often end up being bullies too.

I think it's mostly that they don't want to get sued for making a bad judgement call, so they default to ham-fisted policies where no judgment is applied. But of course the schools get sued all the time anyways, usually due to stupid policies.

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

#104

Post by [deleted] »

busterarm wrote: post #98
giantg2 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. "Standing up to bullies is the kind of thing that gets young people expelled from school. Something about those zero tolerance policies." So it's not really the standing up part but the policy that gets them expelled.

Rigid, uncaring administrative bodies can often end up being bullies too.

[deleted]

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

#105

Post by xboxnolifes »

glorygut123 wrote: post #69

Surely the real problem here, to my non-American eyes, is having easy access to a firearm, no?

I've always found this reasoning insane. People are in a position where they want, or feel it's the only option, to kill themselves. And someone suggests the problem is access to the ability to do so, rather than what lead them to feel that way?

Guns, drugs, knifes, rope, exhaust, whatever. These always become the focus when a kid kills themselves. How about the circumstances that led to it? Suicide is still a problem is low gun ownership countries.

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

#107

Post by auggierose »

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.

I guess that's a first-strike-wins scenario then. As long as he doesn't visit a Saudi embassy, I would bet on Bezos.

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

#108

Post by xboxnolifes »

gnfargbl wrote: post #58
ctoth wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 facilitat…

Things don't need to be routine to be a problem. Just selectively enforced.

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

#109

Post by xboxnolifes »

tmdyn wrote: post #87
glorygut123 wrote: post #69

Surely the real problem here, to my non-American eyes, is having easy access to a firearm, no?

To this American's eyes, not mentioning that at all is a glaring omission. I recognize they might not want to in the story of the representative's son (as it might come across as blaming the parents in a recent tragedy) but even though it's for sure relevant in the aggregate.

It's the third sentence...

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

#110

Post by dudul »

glorygut123 wrote: post #69

Surely the real problem here, to my non-American eyes, is having easy access to a firearm, no?

Maybe you should open your eyes a bit more then

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Amanda_Todd

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Tyler_Clementi

Teenagers don't need a gun to kill themselves. This is not the issue at hands here.

Post reply on HN