How The Fast Times Of The Paparazzi Came to a Halt
buzzfeed.com
buzzfeed.com
Guilty, all of them.
The economics of invasive celebrity photography go like this: companies pay (down-market) advertisers to get them name recognition; those advertisers pay tabloids for ad-space; the tabloid pays paparazzi for a hook to go on the cover.
What are the comparable economics of child abuse?
Secondary sources might get paid for access of course -- or might even not, all those stories in the media always talk about forums / clubs etc. and people exchanging stuff, not so much paying for it.
I'm just not sure where the demand side is. Like you said, I've also never heard of child porn "consumers" who weren't just trading the "amateur" videos created by others in the same groups.
From another angle: jump on Tor and you can find places to buy stolen credit cards, hire hit-men, or order drugs within 15 minutes. But you'll never encounter a "put Bitcoins in, get illegal pornography out" page. Is this sort of stuff just really well hidden (which I doubt, given the Streisand Effect); or is it a semi-backwards "industry" that avoids using the Internet for anything; or what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ore is a good reference: CP was being sold fairly openly from a website, and it and every single credit-card-holder found in its customer database was raided. Subsequently it appears that a number of those CC holders hadn't actually bought it themselves, but had had their card stolen.
I've also heard reports of 'sharing rings' that require the user to maintain an upload/download ratio, rather like the regular piracy torrent community and old BBSs. These are particularly dangerous as they're incentivising the making of new "content" (ie committing horrible traumatising abuse).
Princess Di was thought to be a master of the press for instance.
There is a certain amount of celebrities creating their own feeding frenzy.
My issue is more when people not in the game get hit by media storms.
"press" != "paparazzi"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana,_Princess_of_Wales#Death
Drunk driving probably didn't help either if you read the link you posted..
Nice that Buzzfeed is doing journalism. Shitty that it's funded off of their content theft...
JustFab: The Billion Dollar Startup with a Secret Past [1]
Larry Ellison's Cat Island [2]
Or literally dozens (hundreds?) of others. [3]
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10278697
Considering that pretty much all of traditional journalism is now chasing Buzzfeed in style, it doesn't matter if you work for Buzzfeed or the imitators, you'll still be working at a place with the same basic approach. You might as well work at the one that is making the model work, rather than the ones that have latched on to it as the most recent attempt to slow their downward spiral.
Sites that are mostly junk but also put out the occasional good story are a significant problem for HN. We can't ban them, because losing good stories is worse than tolerating bad ones (the latter are annoying, but get flagged). Our solution is to penalize them, review the stories, and take the penalty off the good ones. The next step will hopefully be to distribute the review process to the community.
Half the responses in this subthread seem to be from people who honestly believe that every actor and musician and athlete cares about money above all else and deserves any consequences of that drive, and it's just really bizarre.
I'm sure some famous people purposefully encourage paparazzi to follow them, but certainly not all of them. You must have noticed how most of the photos coming from paparazzi feature someone who's famous in particular circles looking pissed off at a gaggle of photographers following them around as they go to the shops with a hangover.
How dare they successfully make crappy music for a living, beating the shit out of the art of music, and willingly watering down their offerings, while at the same time selling themselves as sex symbols and teenage idols, oftentimes willingly cooperating and provoking the media for cheap publicity, and expect their family to live normal lives!
Later, "Why is everyone in politics about as human as a lizard in a suit?"
Or, in the Daily Mail, "How dare someone be trans and attempt to work as a teacher! We must expose them!"
"I didn't think that becoming a celebrity would screw up my private life," said no one ever.
the fat-hate is unnecessary and plays into the same paparazzi culture that you decry.
"Gentleman of above-average girth, who might weight more than the average person in our skinny-normative society but still has feelings, y'know, and it's hard to get McDonald's burger juice off of a white shirt if you're out for the night trying to get Lindsay Lohan to do something embarrassing and you don't have time to, like, do laundry, and so would just appreciate it if you wouldn't make a big deal about the way he looks while he's busy making fun of other people."
I've actually seen lots of people say that (and, even more often, seen people say that they didn't expect the thing they did that led to their celebrity to lead to celebrity and then screw up their private life.)
And yet, is that even remotely true? Does being rich and famous make someone so much happier and immune from suffering that a little extra suffering here and there (such as invasions of privacy by the paparazzi) still results in net less suffering than the average person? Every indication seems to point toward that not being the case in the vast majority of cases. And there are many indications that the cost of fame can indeed result in significant suffering, as many high profile suicides and overdoses after long battles with drug addiction testify.
Celebrities are just people, they should be treated as such.
> Little more than a decade ago, stars like Paris Hilton would “inadvertently” leak their plans to the paparazzi — part of the wink-wink symbiotic relationship that fueled their tabloid fame. But what once took an army of clamoring paparazzi can now be tweeted, Instagrammed, Snapchatted, and Vined.