It seems like an obvious thing but if you’re going to do something stupid, don’t use the most easily transferred and recorded medium to do it. It amazes me the stupid things people post online in ignorance of the power of the instant functions of copy, paste and forward! Following on from my recent post about politicians being ignorant to the power of Web 2.0, i thought i would take a look at a few examples that have popped up in the last week.
Facebook has been in the news this week for its lack of action over an alleged porn ring operating on its site. It has come under fire for shutting down the offending pages but not contacting the police. Whilst this issue goes to the heart of Facebook privacy issues ie. should it be Facebook’s responsibility to police its users and report any potential criminal activity, to me this case is a typical example of stupid behaviour on the web. Whilst sites like Facebook seem like an easy way to quickly and easy share illegal photos and videos, did the 11 arrested really think they would get away with using a website known for changing privacy settings and making you opt out, rather than opt in to increased public exposure?
A second case of stupidity this week has been the sackings of senior Victorian police who were caught sending emails “containing highly offensive material including sexual, violent, homophobic and racist content”. Up to 25 officers have been identified as having sent material, with 4 already sacked. It is disturbing that those who are meant to serve and protect the community have felt the desire to send such material, but again, how stupid can you get, sending things using your work email? The naivety is astounding.
Some cases of email, Twitter or Facebook fail aren’t intentional cases of willingly abusing the internet for criminal matters, some are just plain embarrassing mistakes made by the flick of a finger and sending something to wrong recipient or from the wrong account.
The National Theatre in the UK was a victim of such a discrepancy this week. An employee of the theatre company was clearly unaware that they were logged into the work account and not a personal Twitter account when they tweeted: “Well, Steve Norris is clearly a giant cunt“. According to A Younger Theatre blog, the offending tweet was removed 50 minutes and an apology issued to the company’s followers stating:
“Sincere apologies. The NT believes its account has been hacked. Earlier tweet in response to Standard article did not come from the NT.”
Whilst i think that is perhaps a clever way to deflect any potential fallout away from the company, to me the whole thing reads like a small mistake by not logging out of the work Twitter account before firing off an angry Tweet. Synonyms for Churlish, a theatre student’s blog agrees, posting an open letter to the National Theatre, thanking them for the “passionate tweet about relevant issues”.
The final example i’ll leave you this week is not about stupidity when using the internet but a warning about modern technology. If you’re going to do something silly like put a neighbour’s cat in a wheely bin, make sure you’re not caught on CCTV when doing so.
Not only will you get caught by cat lovers distributing the video online to identify you, but you’ll be parodied forever on YouTube.
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