I really don’t like cases like this, nor do I like how much the legal system seems to be pushing “guilty by proxy” rulings for a lot of school shooting cases.
It just feels very very very dangerous and ’going to be bad’ to set this precedent where when someone commits an atrocity, essentially every person and thing they interacted with can be held accountable with nearly the same weight as if they had committed the crime themselves.
Obviously some basic civil responsibility is needed. If someone says “I am going to blow up XYZ school here is how”, and you hear that, yeah, that’s on you to report it. But it feels like we’re quickly slipping into a point where you have to start reporting a vast amount of people to the police en masse if they say anything even vaguely questionable simply to avoid potential fallout of being associated with someone committing a crime.
It makes me really worried. I really think the internet has made it easy to be able to ‘justifiably’ accuse almost anyone or any business of a crime if a person with enough power / the state needs them put away for a time.
I just would like to show something about Reddit. Below is a post I made about how Reddit was literally harassing and specifically targeting me, after I let slip in a comment one day that I was sober - I had previously never made such a comment because my sobriety journey was personal, and I never wanted to define myself or pigeonhole myself as a “recovering person”.
I reported the recommended subs and ads to Reddit Admins multiple times and was told there was nothing they could do about it.
I posted a screenshot to DangerousDesign and it flew up to like 5K+ votes in like 30 minutes before admins removed it. I later reposted it to AssholeDesign where it nestled into 2K+ votes before shadow-vanishing.
Yes, Reddit and similar are definitely responsible for a lot of suffering and pain at the expense of humans in the pursuit of profit. After it blew up and front-paged, “magically” my home page didn’t have booze related ads/subs/recs any more! What a totally mystery how that happened /s
The post in question, and a perfect “outing” of how Reddit continually tracks and tailors the User Experience specifically to exploit human frailty for their own gains.
Edit: Oh and the hilarious part that many people won’t let go (when shown this) is that it says it’s based on my activity in the Drunk reddit which I had never once been to, commented in, posted in, or was even aware of. So that just makes it worse.