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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

The amount of victim blaming in these comments is astounding. Three people are in the hospital because of an armed maniac, and a bunch of the comments are about how YouTube brought this on themselves with their policies about videos.

I’m not religious, but y’all need Jesus.

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The people who were shot are the victims, no one blames them or suggests they did wrong.

YouTube is not a victim. Discussing questionable corporate policies of a company is not victim blaming.

I completely disagree. YouTube is a victim too. Using an incident like this to criticize a policy you don’t like is completely beyond the pale. The fact that they apparently drove a crazy person to attempted homicide has no bearing whatsoever on whether those policies are good or bad.

I don't agree that corporations are people. If you believe that a corporation is a person, then I see your argument, despite not agreeing with it.

Why do they need to be “people” to be a victim?

Even if you want to insist that YouTube can not possibly be a victim, it’s still horrible to jump on a multiple attempted homicide to criticize policies about videos posted on a web site.

If you get in a car accident, no one counts your car as a victim. This is the same thing.

Unlike cars, corporations are at least made of people.

If you steal from a corporate-owned store, is that a victimless crime?

In that case you're robbing the people who own the corporation (shareholders). They're the victims, not the corporation itself.

A corporation is owned by people. It is not "made of" people like some grotesque colossus.

If we can assign victimhood to the shareholders then surely we can assign blame as well? Seems like you’re just slightly moving the pointers with no actual consequence here.

People got shot and HN commenters are using it as a platform to criticize content policies of the company they work for. That is the pertinent thing here. Semantic quibbles about which specific entities count as the “victims” are not terribly relevant.

A company is not a person, and cannot be a victim of an incident like this. Especially when corporate policies directly incited the attack.

"Especially when corporate policies directly incited the attack."

Wow. This woman was clearly unwell, and while these policies may have triggered her, they can't be reasonably said to have incited the attack, as "incite" means that it's actually encouraging violence, not merely that it caused someone to go nuts.

Seriously, y'all need Jesus. Put the blame for these hospitalized gunshot victims where it belongs, on the armed maniac who shot them.

For the relatively uninvolved individuals who were shot, yes, the blame is on the angry woman who shot them. For YouTube as an organization - not an individual - whose corporate base was the target of a violent act? I do blame the overall policies and actions.

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