None of the adults in this behaved appropriately.<p>1 The mother of the child telling about what the other kids did - instead of talking to the other parents found it right to send anonymous messages.<p>2 The other parents found it right to go into full-denial + legal mode.<p>3 Police and prosecutor instead of talking sense into the adults, went into misinterpretation of evidence for re-election gain.<p>4 Global media who just repeated and sensationalized the claims without further investigation.<p>5 A global social media audience amplifying the outrage.<p>6 Cameras everywhere and a society which doesn’t allow teenagers to be teenagers and try themselves out - and therefore can be blackmailed.
it is amazing to me how the police weaponize themselves against the innocent. they took her husband's work computer, daughter's xbox, and every tv in the house. for what? just pure harassment. based on what a teenage girl made up, how can they be so credulous? oh this cheerleader says she never vaped, yeah let's just believe that. i find it hard to swallow that anyone could be that much of a dullard.
Title doesn't do it justice. It's such a tangled clusterduck of judicial/police incompetence, AI effects on society making it impossible to believe anything, at the same time adults feeling comfortable sending death threats without having any reliable facts, obsessive parenting, weird US school culture and even CSAM rears its ugly head, all in one
> sentenced to three years’ probation and 70 hours of community service; she had to undergo a mental heath assessment and wear an ankle monitor for three months<p>While I respect our justice system, as imperfect as it is, extreme outlier failures are heartbreaking. Reminds me of reading Bryan Stevenson's book
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
This article was such a confusing read. I got to the end and could still barely tell what the result was. Had to search back just to find out the officer was really collecting troves of child porn. Apparently the woman also collected that imagery, just didn't create it? And then sent it to everyone in town?<p>And at the end, it all felt like pretty girl's desirable (and obviously not virgin pure), perp is fat and ugly, cops are really evil pedos who abuse their information access, and all America really gives a ** about is watching the whole thing tailspin. And like @floydnoel noted below, it seems like all anybody did was maximize torture for everyone involved all around. Sims watching sims, and we still just wanna watch people get tortured on TV.<p><pre><code> Scratchy: [to Bart and Lisa] Why are you laughing?
Itchy: [to Scratchy] Hey, they're laughing at your pain.
Scratchy: [reattaches his head to his body] That's mean.
Itchy: Let's teach'em a lesson. [shaking Scratchy's hand]</code></pre>
more than the effect of deepfakes, I fear the accusation of deepfakes / plausible deniability from claiming deepfakery rocking being a substantial issue. Like politicians screaming "fake news" media
the substance of the actual allegations that were brought against spone is that she was sending harassing messages to parents, children and to coach. she admitted to sending some of those messages, but denied sending other messages. she was doing that anonymously either from a burner number or from random accounts. she gets convicted of that specifically. but then when interviewed by the op's journalist she denies sending any kind of messages at all.<p><pre><code> Spone may not manipulate videos and images, but she definitely collects them. Still, she says she never sent them. “The charges were that she directly sent messages to the minors,” Birch adds. “That never happened. That’s the point.”
But did she send messages to the gym and the parents? There is a long pause. “No,” Spone eventually says.
I’m surprised to hear her say this, given Birch told the Washington Post Spone messaged the parents out of concern for what their daughters had put online. When I point this out, there’s another long pause. “If I said that, I said it,” Birch says, with a shrug. “It is what it is.”
Even if Spone is guilty of sending the five messages, she is innocent of the claims that made her notorious. Sending anonymous and unwelcome text messages is not the same as digitally manipulating images of minors.
</code></pre>
in my opinion this is the core of the article. the charges of digitally manipulating images were never brought against her, but she got victimized as a result of police incompetence and a public witch hunt. the article thought tries to paint her entirely as a victim. birch is her lawyer, spone gets convincted on harassment of minors charges, birch claims that such harassment never took place, meanwhile birch and stone can't agree on which messages were sent even when talking to a sympathetic journalist. shouldn't the question of harassment be handled by appeal? instead of the appeal though, they are bring various pain and suffering suits against the county, which is entirely reasonable, but not quite what the article tries to imply.<p>in my read of the article a nasty busybody harasses people, happens in this kind of communities all the time, but this time the whole thing gets caught in a national witch hunt. the witch hunt is awful, but it lets the nasty busybody play victim across the board.
Discussed in 2021, but the possibility that the material wasn't fake didn't appear to be considered:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26447471">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26447471</a>
The narrative of "Ignore this, it's a Deepfake" is very strong, and it's now clear that we as a society are being conditioned to react accordingly.<p>What happens if the 1TB "Insurance" folder on Anthony Weiner's laptop, the one that allegedly made seasoned NYPD officers vomit when they viewed the contents, is inevitably released? Would we all be told "Ignore this, it's a Deepfake"?