Here's our favorite response to Susan Arnout Smith's story of a fake Facebook profile of her, posted by mtgradwell.
The vileness of the Internet
So much missing of the point. "Wah ... wah ... wah," "a little melodramatic?" "The whingeing doesn't match the crime" etcetera etcetera.
The problem isn't that "something as childish and unimportant as a fake FB page was enough to send [Susan] over the edge." Nor is it that "she's full of shit."
The problem is that no matter how vile, vicious and disreputable Facebook becomes, there are still millions of people who will take it seriously. And Facebook has no interest in putting the record straight, and is even less contactable than all the other fly-by-night junk websites dedicated to filling your hard disk with viruses. And people, millions of people, are so far gone that they welcome this situation and defend it, here and elsewhere.
If "the incidence of Facebook 'citizens' being victims of attacks serious enough to cause damaging mental anguish are just a tiny, tiny fraction of the number of real-life attacks causing similar or much worse pain every day" then that only makes Facebook's [lack of] response worse. If it really was such a tiny problem, then a multi-billion-dollar corporation ought to be able to get on top of it. They're happy enough to make those billions by selling your personal details to the highest bidder, not so happy when they're asked to do the very minimum that basic decency requires.
But of course it's not a tiny problem. If lack of basic human decency was a tiny problem, it wouldn't be so evident everywhere you go on the Internet.
To read the rest of the comments, click here.
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