Posing as a submissive woman looking for an aggressive dom, Jason Fortuny, posted an explicit ad to Craigslist Seattle; capturing all received emails and re-posting them to the web. The result is highly controversial and extremely Not Safe For Work. Many peoples lives have been ruined by this single action β posing a lot of questions concerning anonymity and Internet law. If nothing else, this is certainly an interesting read and is excellently surmised by Andy. I wonder what the implications will be against Craigslist Personal ads as a whole.
I imagine that if there are more copy cats of this original prank, something will have to give. The internet simply exaggerates something that is meerly embarassing. If it is more then that, and it ruined lives, well who is at fault? Should the responders been posting what they did to complete strangers?
Scenario on smaller scale: Your in a movie theater, and you see a cute girl across the isle. You lean over and start chatting with her. Sure it sucks, but are you going to press charges against this girl? And then tell your boss you did this on company time, etc. And he specifically targeted personal info, asking for face pictures and telling responders not to be paranoid.
Lack of judgement does not make you at fault if someone takes advantage of you. If I was a small, attractive drunk girl who stumbled into an alley and was sexually assaulted, would it be my fault for not exercising lack of judgement? Would the rape be my fault and not the fault of a sick rapist? I dare you to say yes. I would never give out info like some of these responders did, but does that make the responders any less of a victim? A lot of people defend this by passing moral judgement on the responders, some of whom may have been cheating on a significant other.
And even if they were, who made Jason Fortuny the guy in charge of outing cheaters? Anyone with half a brain that reads this bastards LJ can see that. Nice way to live people. On a somewhat bright side, I think this has gone even farther than he wanted it to and I really hope this guy gets sued and has his ass handed to him on a plate. Listen to the ads last weekβ¦.. I havent been able to find a working link to the full details, but it sounds to me that anyone who makes an effort to engage in illegal acts, or even morally objectionable ones should be prepared to pay the price.
