So you’re a fan of judges doing their jobs, but not a fan of journalists doing theirs?
Tracking down and trying to talk to those your sources have accused of wrongdoing to try and get their side of the story and to get them to speak on the record is kind of literally Investigative Reporting 101, and has been for actual centuries now.
Investigative reporters should act professionally. They should setup a formal appointment with the accused and remain neutral. In the bbc report they showed up uninvited and asked "We want to know why you're not protecting children, Mr. Brooks" which is a loaded question [1].
That’s not actually a loaded question… they had a source with clear and convincing proof of the criminal victimization of numerous children by one of Mr. Brooks’s users who had weaponized the service he provided, as well as both law enforcement and child protection organizations indicating that Omegle’s service was being actively weaponized against children; as a matter of both rhetoric and law it was a foregone conclusion that Mr. Brooks was not protecting children, and there’s obvious public interest in his answer to that question. Arguably it’s something you could criticize as gotcha journalism, but that’s often a weak critique because you saying they’ve got an agenda is predicated on you having your own. Also there is a LONG history of very credible journalists tracking down and confronting those who don’t want light shone on their activities and therefore aren’t exactly inclined to schedule formal appointments… sure, it can be seen as showboating, especially for a television journalist, but it’s still just one of the tools of investigative journalism and you’d call it legit if it was exposing some form of public corruption or criminal activity that was beyond your personal pale.
I wouldn't ever call it legit for a journalist to chase someone around yelling questions at them and then use the footage, because it's the kind of thing that makes the "guest" look guilty regardless of actual guilt.
Showing up and getting actual answers, sure, but if you chased me around yelling questions about why I'm not protecting the children I would 100% run away rather than give you an in-depth interview. It looks bad until you think about it for five seconds and realise how confronting the situation is to even an innocent man, just like the Reid technique etc.
When judges do their job, you the accused have due process and legal representation.
I specified my issue (aspergers) for a reason. I would need legal and competent representation if I were accused of something.
We know from people that have actually consented to be in the public sphere (politicians, performers, etc) that even denying an accusation against you still leaves you a pariah with the scarlet letter, to be ostracized in some cases.
Smearing and destroying a person extra-judicially with no "burden of proof" to convict isn't something I'm okay with.
If there is legitimate wrongdoing of some kind, an investigation, carried out by the designated representatives (police, detectives, prosecutors) who are paid by our tax dollars and not by advertisers or the wealthy is what's preferable and actually representative.
> We know from people that have actually consented to be in the public sphere (politicians, performers, etc) that even denying an accusation against you still leaves you a pariah with the scarlet letter, to be ostracized in some cases.
Your actions as the officer of a company are generally considered to be "public".
You don't have a right to privacy over your business (you certainly don't have to answer questions from a journalist either, but they're not generally invading your privacy by merely asking them).
He wasn’t being accused of a criminal act, ergo he didn’t need legal representation on hand. He was being asked by a professional journalist for a world-renowned publishing source why he wasn’t doing more as the responsible officer to keep his company’s product from putting children into harms way in exactly the way his product was designed to perform… he had neither any right to avoid being questioned nor any real interest in avoiding providing comment. He might not like being approached, and if he has some condition that makes such in-person discussion difficult I’m certainly sympathetic but he could just as certainly have communicated by email as he had been asked to do, but chose not to.
As for the reputational risk you’re pointing to, nothing here was trying to cancel him, ostracize him, etc… the journalist was, I think rightly, trying to pressure him into changing his business’s product to prevent the very real harm that product has been, unquestionably, used to perpetrate. There is a very legitimate question why he wasn’t doing more to prevent his platform’s weaponization when his platform was pretty much by design ripe for exactly that use case.
It certainly is when you attempt to avoid making public comment over some matter to which the public has an overriding interest.
In terms of ethics, I’ll side with the journalist’s here over the guy running a service that randomly matches adults with children for video chat when he didn’t immediately shut down the service for a top-to-bottom rethink the moment he found out it’d been used by a serial pedophile.
There is no journalist here to side with unfortunately. Ethics are infringed upon whether the other party is responsible for worse violations or not. It's not an either-or situation.
You can't shut down everything once a bad actor does heinous things. There would be nothing left around. No more streets, no more cafes, no more trash bins, no more cars. Nothing.
As it has been pointed out, omegle did arguably provide more protection against bad actors that lots of other services around today. If you're in a situation you don't like, just press next and it's over. Nobody can contact you or recognise you in any way.
The crimes happen when you're not anonymous anymore, after exchanging snapchat or instagram accounts for example. They don't happen in a months long omegle conversation.
The root of the problem is being careless and providing identifying information. Obviously kids are too young to understand all the dangers, that's what parents are for. You wouldn't let your kids alone in the middle of the city and then sue it when a pedophile gets access to them. You can't let your kids use the Internet without keeping an eye on what is going on and warning them of the perils.
Tracking down and trying to talk to those your sources have accused of wrongdoing to try and get their side of the story and to get them to speak on the record is kind of literally Investigative Reporting 101, and has been for actual centuries now.