Broadcast Media

This idea popped into my head unbidden. I have no idea where the idea for this thread came from, honestly.

In the age of the Internet, more ordinary people can disseminate information faster than ever before. As with all such powerful capabilities, this comes with some unintended consequences. Sometimes you find information that you didn't want to see. Maybe some pictures or something. Other times, you post something without thinking, or accidentally, that a lot more people see than you would have wanted. Maybe you did it in an emotional moment without thinking about the potential consequences. It's difficult to take back.

FOCUS: What information have you learned on the Internet that you'd rather unlearn? Did you have a "small world" moment where you found out some facts about someone you knew in real life that you'd rather not know?

ALT FOCUS: What have you posted on the Internet that you wish you could take back? Are there noobish Usenet posts out there with your real name on them? Any consequences from this?

 

One word: Goatse.

 

One letter: /b/

I'm drawn to that site because there is some legitimately funny shit on there, it's just diluted at a 15:1 ratio with horrible, awful, terrible things. There are things that gross you the fuck out (goatse-type stuff) and then there are pictures of guys injecting diarrhea into their urethras and then masturbating. You know, stuff that would make Allord cringe.





Unless that was Allord.

 

So a friend and mentor of mine is a very distinguished sort of fellow. Older, in his late 50s, very well-respected guy. He does not keep up with the latest happenings on the Intarwebs, or at least the parts that people on TiB, including myself, frequent.

He and I did some legal consulting together a few years ago, and so we got to learn all about the justice system from the inside. He was an expert witness and I was a "confidential consultant" (someone whose work product is protected from disclosure, the same as an attorney's) and so we'd work on direct testimony together and stuff like that, with me playing his counsel. Over the course of this experience we developed a sort of shared fascination with legal things.

A while back, Moot (from 4chan) was called to testify during the Sarah Palin email hacking trial. His testimony transcript was posted on the Internet and so I was reading it. I was surprised at how well he did, especially given that he's like 22. You can tell when a witness is well-prepared to testify: answers just what is asked, stays on topic, keeps answers clear and easily understandable. He also may be the first person to testify in open court as to the exact nature of "rickrolling."

So I send this to my friend as sort of a legal curiosity. But of course he doesn't know what 4chan is and what /b/ is or anything like that. So in my email, I preface it explaining that 4chan is a terrible place characterized by mob rule, and /b/ is the worst of it. I spare him the graphic descriptions of what you can see there, because he'd probably find even the descriptions offensive.

So he sends me an email the next day. Apparently he is working on another case with a bunch of high-powered trial lawyers. About 10 of them are all assembling in a conference room for an all-day meeting, and he's presenting first. This is the kind of meeting that costs somebody what a well-off person makes in 6 months. He has his laptop hooked up to the screen. While they are waiting for everyone to show up, he starts telling them about this guy called 'moot' and his testimony about rickrolling.

To illustrate his point, he chooses this exact moment to visit 4chan for the first time in his life.

The front page of 4chan is pretty tame. I mean, it's not all self-administered catheterizations right up-front. So he's feeling good about this story he's telling, and he decides to visit /b/ for the first time in his life. He clicks and scrolls down.

I don't know what they saw. I didn't ask. I didn't want to know. I do know that he apparently scrambled to hit the close button on the window as fast as a human can do so. Thankfully $8,000 an hour worth of trial lawyers aren't fazed by too much and everybody thought it was funny, but still...bad timing...

 

Anti-Focus: Hi guys.

I have never, ever seen or learned anything on the internet that I'd rather never have seen. But then blood, gore, putrescence, and Amy Winehouse don't phase me in the slightest, so I doubt that's surprising.

I could show you guys some of the stuff that didn't really bother me, if you'd like...

Edit:

Dude seriously I bet you over 9000 internets it was Eric Bauman, or some of the other sick fucks from EbaumsWorld. That man needs to be shut down, his type is just not acceptable in polite society.

 

Back in ye' olden days, when the intarwebs was a sloooooow place and 56k modems were new fangled - I worked for an ISP that had a service where you could enter a link on a webpage and our script would go and download that the contents of that link and save it on our server - so you could download it at a full 56k instead of waiting for it to download even more slowly from where the fuck ever. Also, anyone else using our service could go through all the downloaded material and see if there was anything they wanted. Which sometimes (a couple times a week) lead to people finding pretty objectionable stuff.

Before I first tried ecstasy, my aspergers syndrome included almost no ability to empathize with other people's suffering. So I had the delightful job of reviewing the inappropriate content reports on that store. That was awesome. The gore and horror and police photos leaked to shock sites were all pretty awful - but the child abuse material was the stuff that killed me. Even being retarded and broken - I had a really hard time dealing with that shit. We reported shit to the cops almost weekly.

There is also a relatively widely known photoshop of some woman's tit with creepy holes around the nipple and areola - it's supposedly some kind of parasitic infection with worms in the holes - the photoshop is some kind of lotus seed pod. I HATE that fucking picture. share she horror - short of child abuse material - this is the worst thing that I've ever seen, even knowing it's fake - creeps me the fuck out.

 

Focus: I wish I never saw eel soup, that shit fucked me up on sex for a solid two weeks, way worse than two girls one cup in my opinion.

 

One boozy night I told BlueDog my real name. I figure it's only a matter of time before I wake up and find an 8 foot coonass passed out on my front porch.