11–20 of 88 posts
Sorry to be simplistic, but that rule is the best. If you think you need to pile on someone, don't.
Our primal lizard brains just love to stomp the shit out of someone, so when society gives us signals that it's okay, we love to do it. We must resist this urge before Piggy's head get crushed by a boulder.
You can put anything in the URL you like, as long as the number matches and it passes whatever regular expression gawker runs on those URLs, it will point to the right news story. Hardly conclusive proof that gawker changed the headline when someone can do something like http://gawker.com/5968551/ryan-lanza-is-a-cold-blooded-murde... and the URL bar doesn't even change to reflect the original title.
>(Gawker also changed its story, but proof of the original headline is still in the URL) You can put anything in the URL you like, as long as the number matches and it passes whatever regular expression gawker runs on those URLs, it will point to the right news story. Hardly conclusive proof that gawker changed the headline when someone can do something like http://gawker.com/5968551/ryan-lanza-is-a-cold-blooded-murd…
I wonder what (if any) legal recourse Ryan Lanza might have against the news agencies that libeled his name. I imagine it really depends on the exact wording used, but Ryan could have a great defamation/emotional distress case on his hands, when everything settles.
Is it possible to do a... reverse class-action suit? In which you file suit against everyone who created a "Ryan Lanza burn in hell" Facebook page, every news outlet that libeled you, etc., all at once?
But winning a libel suit is no panacea — it doesn't magically make your life better. See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jewell#Libel_cases and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jewell#Aftermath .
Every time something like this happens people react in quite predictable ways, the creation of Facebook pages is one of the more common ones. Why do people do this? Does it come from social pressure to show just how angry they are with actions, is it just how people cope with terrible news (by doing something even if it's ultimately futile) or is it just another case of humans doing irrational things? My google-fu is…
That actually took some work to Google up. I thought I'd be able to find something specifically about humans faking social signals in exactly this context, but I didn't. Also, "social signalling" is full of results about trying to teach computers how to deal with human social signals, and how to process data from social networks (not quite the same thing). It's a busier term that I thought it would be.
(Dramaturgy is a word I'd never encountered before, either, though I've noticed the concept in play in people around me. Not mentioned in the Wikipedia page that I could see, but something you can probably see once you are looking, is that some people act as if they are in a play constantly, but are playing to the wrong audience. I have a relative who acts as if the entire world is a soppy mid-day women's talk show and constantly play up their concern to an audience who is actually pretty OK with, say, a 12-year old riding a bike without having to express concern every time that they are going to hurt themselves. And there's always some people who never seem to leave High School, or at least take a few decades longer than it should to realize that they're not on that stage anymore.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it possible to do a... reverse class-action suit? In which you file suit against everyone who created a "Ryan Lanza burn in hell" Facebook page, every news outlet that libeled you, etc., all at once?
The nice thing about America is that you can sue anyone for anything (even if the case has no merit and goes nowhere). But winning a libel suit is no panacea — it doesn't magically make your life better. See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jewell#Libel_cases and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jewell#Aftermath .
I wonder what (if any) legal recourse Ryan Lanza might have against the news agencies that libeled his name. I imagine it really depends on the exact wording used, but Ryan could have a great defamation/emotional distress case on his hands, when everything settles.
EDITS (replies to below):
Defamation laws in the US are actually very complex and in certain cases ambiguous. Different states have different standards for civil liability. In Gertz v. Robert Welch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertz_v._Robert_Welch,_Inc.), which involved a newspaper publishing lies about a non-public official, the Supreme Court held that state defamation laws had to have the plaintiff prove at the very least fault of some kind on the defendant's part, and that for punitive damages malice must be proved. The court also found that people cannot be made into a public official.
Certain statements are considered to be inherently damaging and fault does not need to be proved.
Regardless, clearly Ryan Lanza does not have a case since law enforcement officials did originally identify him, wrongly, as the suspect. The police were clearly not negligent because the reason they ID'd him as the gunman was because his ID was found on the gunman's body. I don't know if the news actually stated as a fact that he was guilty.
In this situation, Facebook is merely a modern day phone book (albeit vastly more robust and complex). It is the news organization that bears the responsibility of gathering, checking and publishing verified facts. That's called reporting.
