I wrote about cyberbullying in my previous entry and this rant is
a continuation of that
There seems to be this recent trend of mainstream publications
trying to incite a lynch mob by publicly shaming ordinary people for what
wouldn't even be considered misdemeanor offenses.
The video below was shared on top gear and went viral shortly
afterwards. It’s a video of two young women in a car trying to ruthlessly awaken a commuter from his deep slumber by viciously blowing their horn. Watch the video below to see the very face of evil (/sarcasm) Seriously,
who hasn't tried waking up a friend for the Lulz. Maybe
the guy thought that it was mildly annoying but i doubt that he was seriously
offended by it. He probably slept again and moved on with his life unlike
majority of the commenters on the site. I seriously think that if you
replace the two attractive women with two ordinary looking commuters there wouldn’t
be as much hate. But because they were driving a car, they looked like arrogant, rich bitches and therefore deserving of the vilest insults.
Top gear is especially fond of this practice. It’s one thing if it’s
a random internet nerd posting this story on facebook for his or her friends to
see. It’s an entirely different thing if it’s a mainstream publication with
magazines that you see in newstands that’s supposedly manned by adults. When
you have more than a million followers and you ask the masses to lynch
somebody, they will do it with relentless passion. The owner of a maseratti who
punched an LTO officer in the face. He was publicly insulted, along with his
family without waiting for his side to be aired. Later on it was discovered
that the LTO officer was notorious for being an A-hole. Not enough reason to be
punched in the face, maybe (?). but at least if there had to be lynching, it
shouldn’t have been as one sided as it initially was. Or just leave out the lynching
altogether and let the parties involved settle it among themselves. Then there was
the beast mode guy, cars parked incorrectly with their plate numbers in full
display –also lynched online
 |
| I specifically like the comment about not "murdered-ing" the english language. What's most disturbing about this story is not the prank itself but the fact that there are more than 11,000 comments and i'd say more than 90% of them are at least this brutal |
I understand the need of
these websites to generate traffic but at the very least blur faces out or plate
numbers, especially if there’s no illegal offense involved. There's a reason why plate numbers on cars are
usually blurred in photos. You can find out a lot of information about the
owner of the car by displaying its plate number, including his or her home
address.
Some of these viral stories can be pretty funny and worthy of ridicule. I do laugh at them sometimes but I move
on shortly afterwards. I don’t feel the need to dig out more private info about
them and then make them public, I don’t feel the need to start facebook pages
shaming the people involved in the videos. I don’t feel like raising pitchforks
and inviting my comrades to do the same until we receive a groveling apology
from the person whose life we have practically destroyed. I hope I’m not the
only one who thinks that this lynchmob mentality is getting way out of hand