Scum and Mail-watch: "Cult" suicides and idiotic sensationalism.
Won't someone think of the children?If there's ever a sign that the police are clutching at straws, it has to be in suggesting that the seven suicides that have occured in and around Bridgend in the last twelve months are somehow out of wanting to achieve "fame" on the internet by doing so. There are many reasons behind depression, and especially when it's at its most severe, wanting to die, but even when your thoughts are at their most twisted and self-defeating, I hazard to guess that gaining immortality on Bebo is not the foremost reason for ending your own life.
Of course, whether the police have suggested a link between the 7 suicides or not is up in the air: the Scum claims "cops" fear this could be the case, while on the BBC Tim Jones of the local police makes reasonably clear, unsurprisingly, that there's no link between all of them and no evidence of a suicide pact. Despite this, the Mail led this morning with the usual scaremongering garbage about "a suicide cult" and that "police have private concerns that youngsters may consider it fashionable to have an internet memorial site and are killing themselves for reasons of prestige." Teenagers on social networking sites might be fucking stupid, but they're not that fucking stupid. Copycat attempts are one thing, especially if those involved were close, but to suggest that it's a cult on the basis of that and because they all used social networking is ignorant beyond belief.
At the bottom of this appears to a basic misunderstanding about the memorial pages which have been popping up on MySpace etc when the owner of the profile page dies. They are then often turned into pages of rememberance, tributes and in the case of some of these Bebo pages, apparently putting bricks into a wall of rememberance. Madeleine Moon, who could only be an MP, seems to think that these pages are romanticising suicide, rather than paying tribute to those who died. If these pages are anything like the forum threads I've often read when a member of an online community kills themselves, the very last thing they tend to do is promote suicide; quite the opposite is usually the case. Some tribute pages, especially set-up to those who become infamous online, such as Mitchell Henderson, have been specifically targeted by trolls. I could be horrendously wrong, but to me it seems that those left behind are looking for some kind of easy explanation as to why and not properly examining the real factors behind each individual case.
Typically however, none of the above has stopped the tabloids from starting an instant search for social networking profiles that "romanticise" or "encourage" suicide. The Sun really ought to know better, but it seems that the hacks are on orders to take every possible opportunity to put down social networking sites other than MurdochSpace. Hence we already have this unconciousable garbage on the Scum website's front page:
A quick internet search reveals one profile under the name Suicide Girls.
It carries a disturbing cartoon picture of a pink teddy bear hanging from a rope.
Err, this wouldn't be a profile promoting Suicide Girls would it? The internet soft porn garbage site where anyone with suitably bad tattoos and piercings can become a model? Which isn't anything to do with suicide whatsoever but most certainly to do with making money out of women "outside" of the traditional model mainstream posing naked? This really is scraping the bottom of the barrel sensationalist journalism. And would you possibly believe that if you search Google for Suicide Girls that the second result is their MurdochSpace profile?
A spokesperson for charity PAPYRUS - which works to prevent suicide in young people - described the page as "extremely dangerous".
She added that the image of the teddy bear was "very disturbing".
Ah yes, Papyrus, the organisation that thinks banning any page about suicide other than their own or the Samaritans is a glorious idea. If she seriously thinks that page is "extremely dangerous" or that the teddy bear picture is "very disturbing", she needs to get out on the internet a bit more. Goatse to the left of me, 2girls1cup to the right, here we are, stuck in the middle with morons.
Elsewhere in the Scum, cross-promotion seems to be the order of the day. When Ross Kemp was married to Wade she made certain that all his television appearances were suitably puffed in the paper, but now with Wade off gallivanting with whoever, you'd of thought it would have come to an end. No such luck:
NEW series Ross Kemp In Afghanistan pulled in more than a MILLION viewers on Monday night.
One has to imagine that the key words there are "Sky" and "One".
Labels: Bebo, Daily Mail-watch, Mail-watch, MurdochSpace, Scum-watch, self-promotion, social networking websites, suicide, suicide girls, Sun-watch
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