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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

Hard to verify the source of the video but there is one going around reddit right now showing mass suicides from people jumping out of high rise windows. Claimed to be people in lockdown in Shanghai.

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I saw that video and I don't they are all in Shanghai or all recent.

all recent? are you sure about that? in half of them, you see people without a single mask, wich indicates they are not that recent ;)

aren't you trying to spread misinformation?

https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/annual/measur...

In the USA: 1.4 millions suicide attempt in 2019

4000 suicide a day! make a video about it, and you'll have the same effect ;)

Okok, let's only take deaths

47.5k deaths in 2019 from suicides

130 deaths a day!

2.5 deaths per state a day! make a video about it, and you'll get the same effect!

I believe there was a typo in the post you're replying to — it looks like the poster intended to write "I don't think they're in Shanghai or all recent."

Oh you are right, my bad!

You misread the comment you are responding to. It has typos, so maybe not suprising.

Yeah I forgot a word there. Typed it quickly on my phone. Meant to say I don't think the clips are all recent or in Shanghai.

thats insane why would you believe people when they say that

Yeah, this is bullshit. Even with no knowledge of China or Shanghai whatsoever you should know this is bullshit. There were very few jumpers in New York on September 11th. Most people don’t kill themselves in the face of certain death by burning or a building falling. Mass suicide wasn’t a thing in extermination camps like Auschwitz. Religiously motivated instances of mass suicide rely on peer pressure mechanisms that don’t function when everyone’s in their damned apartment.

Also there’s no hint of this in any of the group chats I’m in and given I’m in Shanghai that would be big local news. Censorship doesn’t work well or fast when people have nothing to do except gossip.

The video is here, (https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/tzosau/peop...) but each clip is unsourced or from an unknown date/time/location. It isn't a collective "mass suicide" in the Jonestown sense of the term, but a mass amount of individuals committing suicide.

I know this guy who's a rabid anti-vaxxer who thinks the COVID vaccines are a bioweapon engineered to kill people as part of a shadowy conspiracy to lower the world population by a billions. He claims that vaccinated people are dropping dead of heart attacks left, right and centre and it's all being covered up. Recently he sent me some "evidence" of this claim which was a compilation of clips (many taken from live TV) of people collapsing or fainting, sometimes clutching their chests, overlayed with spooky music and the Pfizer logo in the corner. Don't you get it? All these people are collapsing because they took the vaccine!

Except within five minutes I was able to find many of those same clips in other videos - eg by searching YouTube for "people fainting" - and most of them predated the pandemic by years. Clearly some troll had just found a bunch of old clips of people collapsing and edited it together into a lazy piece of anti-vaxx propaganda. And it works! People fall for it, even though this particular clip took about thirty seconds to debunk.

My point is - I've seen videos before of people jumping from buildings. They're not hard to find online; the now-defunct r/watchpeopledie was full of them, as was Liveleak (RIP). It would be trivially easy to find a bunch of these clips, edit them together and give them a caption that claims they all happened recently in one place and are part of a disturbing new trend.

So I'm not convinced that this video you shared is what it claims to be.

I understand that, I'm just sharing the video.

Did you point this out to the 'rabid anti-vaxxer' who sent it to you? What was his reaction? My guess is the reality of it doesn't matter one bit to that person.

You guess correctly.

This person isn't my friend, and I consider him beyond help.

Very few jumped in 9/11? Are you kidding me? I personally saw many with my own eyes.

As a percentage it wasn't high. Dozens I think?

Maybe 100 jumpers out of 3000 deaths?

In the worst situation imaginable.

I call that an endorsement for humanity's innate desire to grasp at life.

> as a percentage

Buddy I don't even know where to start here, while being polite.

This is basic numeracy. Looking at several instances of something and asking "Is that a lot?" It was many more suicides than you have seen on an average day but it may be a surprisingly small number given the situation. Percentage is a tool to help you ask "did the many incidents I heard about represent what most people there experienced, or not?"

I should've have had "this is a symbolism for how wonderful human beings are" at the start

These were my exact thoughts. Even in a tragedy, most people tried their hardest until the very end.

> Maybe 100 jumpers out of 3000 deaths?

How many of those 3000 were not able to reach the windows?

Keep in mind many 9/11 victims wouldn't have been able to get to a window or break it out. And many would have succumbed to the smoke and not had the chance. Also, one isn't going to commit suicide if they think they are still going to be rescued by the firefighters they knew were on their way. Contrast that with a month of seemingly irrational lockdown with no end in sight because 0-covid is futile.

I don't even understand the point you're trying to help defend. You know a story about suicide must be fake news because suicide isn't a thing that happens? Really?

I’m so sorry to hear that. That must’ve been an awful experience

You got a link to that?

Pretty sure this is it. Cannot stress enough that this video is HIGHLY NSFW.

https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/tzosau/peop...

This is NSFL. For people who are curious but don't want to click, it shows people who committed suicide by hanging, and many, many suicides by jumping off buildings.

Also some comments indiciate that most of the videos are not lockdown related and very old.

This was posted a week ago in /r/china and we removed it for the same reason, it was cold in Shanghai yet in that video everyone is in T-shirts and it's cloudless. We reckon it to be from the north by the accents

Can't date it though.

Shanghai has a population larger than most countries. There are a lot of extreme stories every day in Shanghai. That has to be considered when talking about "mass" anything, even when putting aside the high likelihood of a misleading video.

Funnily enough I don’t recall mass suicide videos from any other city on earth?

Considering that this whole thing started with fake videos from China of people dropping dead in the street, I'm treating any new videos from China with extreme scepticism.

Ridiculous. Of course it's false. Edit: downvotes for pointing out obvious misinformation..

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