Tantacrul here. Can verify myself by making a public comment on my video or something similar.
I'll take you at your word for now, hopefully you aren't a fake or a troll. Staff will surely verify you.
The site contains statements of encouragement for anon users to kill themselves on a daily basis (breaking the supposed main rule of the site)
Eh, I haven't seen any. Note that I consider encouragement to be "do it pussy" and not just standing by and doing nothing (or providing advice on how to do it). If the charge is mere inaction then the site is guilty as hell but that's not the same as encouragement.
The site contains multiple threads where people ask to be DM'd the email addresses of sellers from whom they can buy poisons to kill themselves on a daily basis. They are then given this information (I experienced this personally and I purchased a method myself by following this exact procedure. It was simple.)
Points for being technically true but misleading on implications. Sodium nitrite is literally a food preservative and you can get it from anywhere. You'll need other drugs to fully execute the method but if the site banned this then people would just find the information somewhere else.
The site has instruction threads which were (until my vid came out) publicly available to anyone. They'll be made publicly available again when the hear dies down. This is also what they did when the NYT article came out.
Technically true but also misleading. Sites like
LostAllHope still exist and you can get suicide advice from anywhere. Suicide isn't nuclear physics and that's not even considering methods that require literally no instructions (ie train decapitation)
The site has an instruction thread for buying SN which leads to Exit International, which requires a subscription to join. This is undeniably true
My main issue is that Exit requires people to be 50 years or older and enforces this strictly with requiring government ID verification. The unstated implication in your video was that any minor could join Exit by paying $100 and then get SN that way, which is simply blatantly false. It doesn't help your title is "encouraging the young to die" and at multiple times (like other anti-SS'ers) you keep stressing the point about minors throughout.
The site has a partners section which has been used by predators to target vulnerable young people (leading to a prosecution of one user in Glasgow, which I discuss in the video). The site has not removed the partners section in response. They think it's fine that it remains as is.
I will agree that there has been one case (Craig McInally). However generalizing from this n=1 and saying it's the norm for predators to use it to target vulnerable young people (and again, stressing the 'young' part like you always do) is... highly dishonest.
Predators target vulnerable young people all the time on sites like Twitter.
Here's the case of 26-year-old Aaron Zemand from just a couple months ago who groomed a 13-year-old and
he did it on Discord too. And there are far, far too many instances of shit like this happening on mainstream sites (just scroll through the threads in
Animal Control).
My point is, should platforms like Twitter and Discord be shut down just because of one or a few instances of abusive behavior by its participants? I think you would agree that it's more complicated than that.
(I still think it's funny that even FuneralCry thinks the partners section is a bad idea, though, which you didn't mention!)
The site verifiably coached a 17 year old to kill himself. This kid was not the first minor the site has helped to die.
No. The biggest issue with this is that they simply literally did not know Matteo was 17. If they did, they would have banned him. Besides that point, the most they did was stand by and do nothing. I know you'd rather people robotically post "have you considered, like, not killing yourself" any time someone asks for suicide advice, but at least be honest with that instead of falsely claiming they "coach" people to kill themselves.
As mentioned by others in this thread, the main mascot of the site, who posts morbid nonsense about how everyone should die because life is a cruel mistake - is actively protected by the admin despite constant complaints from other users on the forum who rightly see these posts as toxic and dangerous, given the highly vulnerable nature of many of those on SS.
You do have a point there,
I've been meaning to add more on FuneralCry to the OP. I've added more on FuneralCry at the beginning and removed some of my criticism of your criticism of their behavior.
The site is a 'free speech' site.... unless someone dares to challenge it too effectively. If you do that, you get banned.
I mean you can say this about any free speech place that has any sort of moderation (including here). More details on this pls. If you're talking about your own ban, then that was just you being an asshole (or rather, considered to be an asshole by RainAndSadness' opinion). If you're talking about someone else's ban then I'd like to see more details before placing judgment.
Take those points together and you have the substance of my video. Pretty difficult to see how this can be picked apart, since most of the points are simple statements of fact.
There's more to making an argument than just simple statements of fact. It's very easy to paint a misleading or even false picture even if you hold yourself to the standard of "well it's technically true" statements.
I do not make a judgement about section 230 or whether or not free speech should be curtailed in my video. I simply point out that the debate exists. I have very nuanced feelings about this topic... but in general I am very uneasy with the idea of applying rules that limit free speech. I just felt that my own opinions were not massively relevant. I expected people to make up their own minds. The OP states that my aim is to kill section 230, which is a moronic reading.
I'll correct it. OP has been corrected (I can't change the subtitle, only jannies can.) But you should at least be aware activism against the site may also be activism against Section 230 by proxy (after all, that's what Kelli Wilson / Fixthe26 is aiming to do) and I haven't seen any anti-SS'ers clarify their position and say "ok we're
not going to touch Section 230". I don't have much sympathy for people who say "I don't want Y to happen" when advocating for X that may cause Y.
I do not at any point make a judgement about personal autonomy when it comes to ending one's life. Specifically, I do not make a judgement call about whether someone has the right to take matters into their own hands or not. This is actually not really a point I needed to discuss in the video (again, I have very nuanced views here). My video is about how SS encourages, misinforms, coaches minors, enables psychopaths and discourages seeking mental health treatment.
Well thank you for clarifying. But it doesn't come off that way to others. You seem to not understand just how horrible these 'mental health treatments' you're referring to can be. Many people don't want to interact with law enforcement or don't want to be involuntarily committed, and whether it may be good or not there's always a nonzero chance of being involuntarily committed if you tell any authority that you want to end your life. I don't think it's misinformation to caution against mental health treatments by citing how they can involuntarily commit you (and yes, some people do go overboard with this and say it's always going to happen, but can you blame them?)
My point being, it might be more helpful for mental health authorities to institute a policy of not involuntarily committing people. But changing that is harder than yelling for a website to be taken off the Internet.
There have been many statements to the effect: 'why are we talking about taking down the site, when the REAL problem is the wider world that drives people to feel suicidal in the first place?'. This is an irrelevant criticism. I am not discussing the causes of suicidal ideation. I'm discussing how badly SS misinforms people who are experiencing suicidal ideation. I do not need to discuss why suicidal people feel suicidal in order to make the case that SS is doing an incredibly bad job at providing support for them. This is not rocket science, guys.
To state that I am attacking any kind of personal freedom is nonsense. I am simply against SS because it is run by idiots who cause enormous harm to vulnerable people.
Well, people say that because while SS may have allegedly caused the deaths of at least 45 people, it's a far better harm reduction policy to actually address the flaws with society than "take down this one site, hope it doesn't spring back up in a week like Kiwi Farms, and try not to break the fundamental foundations of the Internet too much in the meantime (if you even care about them)." Sure, it's not like criticisms of society destroy your criticisms of the site, and it may be possible to implement both policies, but people are at least trying to stop people from dying the best way they see fit.
The other point is that even if you got what you wanted and the site was taken down for good (and didn't spring back up in a week), it's not hard to believe suicidal people would just find advice elsewhere or go for something that requires no instructions. It's likely people who would have used SS will still kill themselves (because many of them are the type to conceal problems to themselves and actively refuse treatment they think will take away their personal freedom). You personally might feel good about yourself if the site was down, but I wouldn't. I recognize that it's far more complicated than "site bad, site being down good".
