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Comment by laci27 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this is a mainly US problem or an international one? While I could imagine some of the people I know would do this 'for harmless fun', it's only 1-2 idiots (out of all the people I talked to in my life), but those are jerks in real life too...

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The article did state comments came from all parts of the globe (presumably they're doing some kind of GeoIP look up)?

I'd love to say it's just 1 or 2 idiots but stories like these are so common that Ive come to the conclusion that there is a very real gender bias at play. Which makes me both sad from the perspective of equality and disappointed as a representative of the male species. :(

All parts of the globe, but I can't imagine comments like this coming from The Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland... you know 'from countries such as Norway' (presidential quote here)

Coming from Germany (the one country in that area you didn't mention), we have a fair share of idiots here. We just don't expose them to the world in the manner America does. Some of it, of course, is due to the language barrier.

One of my more depressing findings in life is that no matter how you slice and dice the population, you'll find an abundance of assholes in every slice.

Plenty of that kind of people in Sweden.

Well people who think this is fun are jerks (or kids) to start with, real life or not. But the real world has something the internet lacks: social control. The people you evolve with know you, judge you, and you must maintain a certain attitude and appear to adhere to social norms under the threat of contempt, exclusion, or even legal implications. That keeps society together. I think the internet shows the raw human nature without the social control. And it’s not pretty.

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