Update: Reddit Suicide Lawsuit Is a Hoax

[Therumancer]

snip

^Doesn't know what hate speech is. ^Thinks white supremacy rallies are hate speech. ^Thinks hate speech is covered under freedom of speech.

^Thinks rallies where speeches are held aimed against ethnic groups of people, people with a different sexual orientation, a different religion or simply immigrants into the country as, is the case with the Nazi's in Russia, do not fall under the definition of hate speech.

^In short does not know what hate speech is.

The internet and dictionary say:

Hate speech is, outside the law, any communication that disparages a person or a group on the basis of some characteristic such as race, color, ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, or other characteristic.

In law, hate speech is any speech, gesture or conduct, writing, or display which is forbidden because it may incite violence or prejudicial action against or by a protected individual or group, or because it disparages or intimidates a protected individual or group.

Before you argue a point READ A FUCKING BOOK! The word your thinking off might have more than one meaning.

It's not worth the time, having run into "Gray Day For Ellcia" in a few threads now I get the impression it's a troll, a very good troll, but a troll. I probably made a target for myself by taking a minority position on a lot of issues and then showing I'll follow through and keep talking to people even when I shouldn't, making me a good target to drum up drama-traffic, which this was an attempt to do, by pretty much running off the deep end with my comments about free speech, knowing there was a good chance I'd discuss the point no matter what kind of nonsense was said in response. I'm just slow to catch on.

 

[Therumancer]

The updates to this situation have if anything made me more cynical. My "shocking" attitude about why I don't take suicide claims over the internet seriously, was kind of reinforced by what this turned out to be: a phrank intended to generate attention and drama.

It's a sad world when people do things like this, which makes it so genuine cases aren't taken seriously, but I can only call it how I see it, and react appropriatly. You can only get burned so many times before your going to treat everything with skepticism.

I tend to look at this through the eyes of one of my favorite comments, which I believe came from Churchill "If your not a liberal when your young, you have no heart, if your not a conservative when your old you have no brain". While about politics it's sort of a metaphor for this kind of thing, when your young and inexperienced, it's easy to show the best aspects of humanity through naivity. As you become older, more experienced, and see the world as it really is, you tend to lose your ideals and react practically, and through experience, perhaps wishing the idealistic ways could work, but realizing they can't. That is why I think a lot of more worldly, and jaded people tend to be so dismissive of things like claims of sucicide, especially when you see it over the internet.

Sites like "Encyclopedia Dramatica" tend to have write ups on known suicide trolls and attention seekers, which, allowing for it's style sort of summarizes exactly why people like me think the way we do. The way this turned out has happened before, and will happen again, and as much as that sucks, you have to go with the odds.

 

[Alar]

I don't think Reddit should be held *liable* for their users actions, but they should be required to give the personal information to the authorities in this case, and I think that some sort of charges should be filed against these despicable people who would goad a man who was clearly in crisis.

Should such actions be taken for every case of "trash-talk"? No, that is ridiculous, but this is a wee bit different.

As has been pointed out before, how did they know this guy was being serious? How would ANYONE know that ANYONE over the Internet is planning on doing something serious?

If I told you earlier I was planning on bungee jumping off a skyscraper, do you think I'm really going to do it? No, you'd think it was ridiculous and say something like, "Pics or GTFO!"

Most of those people were probably just trolls who didn't know any better, and there's no way you can prove that any of them might've actually known he was going to go through with it and were egging him on out of a true desire to have him kill himself.

That's where the problem comes from. These people may have been scum for the end product (which we now know was a hoax), but at the end of the day they were only being standard assholes.