On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver exposes just how easy it is to use the internet as a weapon to completely destroy the life of someone you once loved – or destroy the life a stranger, it’s all easy!
Gosh, once upon a time, if you were going to insult someone by letter, it took a good long while to type it out. If you still felt the heat by the time you’d re-written, stamped and sent the missive, any threats contained within would be actionable by law. Similarly, only a crazy person would stand outside and scream obscenities at passers by. Before internet, I don’t believe I ever heard of someone going to their ex-spouse’s place of employment to show everyone that person’s clothesless photos. Such actions would assure that person lodging in a rubber room for 72 hours at best, or an arrest for harassment or worse. Oddly, if those same photos arrive via internet, the victim is blamed instead of the sender!
Enter the Internet! All of the crazy things I just mentioned can be accomplished in little or no time at all. Better yet, if the victim complains it’s likely autorities will tell them they brought it on themselves. They face a similar fate to that faced by rape victims in the bad old days.
John investigates what remedies there are once your life has been ruined by an unhinged revenge junkie online. Some people who have lost employment and privacy feel they have no other recourse than to end it all. There are remedies, but they haven’t kept pace with internet abuse. See what can be done, and also the lengths some anger junkies with a keyboard will go to for the sheer hell of it!
The Internet: A Dark Carnival of Humanities’s Darkest impulses.”