Newswire Misreports Gamer's Suicide

Asriel86 writes "Pulling from the AFP newswire, Yahoo, CNN, and others have been reporting about how a gamer broadcast his own suicide on a gaming forum via a webcam, and that members of the forum continued to ridicule the gamer while he killed himself. Gaming Horizon has just learned that this is completely untrue. The newswire reporter failed to check the facts, and in turn painted this simple gaming forum into cruel monsters. The forum (hosted at metalgearsolid.org) has been taken offline at the request of Government agencies following these news reports."

Comments

Give AFP some feedback

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:

"If you'd like to contact the AFP newswire about their story, you can do so via this form and selecting the "Contact news department" option for the first drop-down."

Government takes metalgearsolid.org offline?

[MobyDisk]

The forum (hosted at metalgearsolid.org) has been taken offline at the request of Government agencies following these news reports."

This appears to be true. The site is down and displays the message below. To me, the story here is how and why "Government agencies" (whoever that is) requested the site to be shut down. And the message appears to be from the ISP, not from metalgearsolid.org. Is this another ISP caving at the first request to shut a site down? Or is there something legitimate happening there? Shutting the site down, when there is nothing wrong with it, just adds to the sensationalism.

Text below:

This Account Has Been Suspended
Please contact support as soon as possible. Your site could have been suspended for one or more of the following reasons.

        * Your site's paid service has expired. To check this, login to your control panel at bluehost.com. If your site is expired, it won't let you log in and will take you immediately to a renewal page.
        * Your site was sending out spam. Please note that many "safelists" are still considered spam. BlueHost.Com has a ZERO tolerance stance towards spam.
        * Your site was consuming too many resources. This happens on occassion to very busy sites that have inefficient scripts running.

For information on restoring your account please call customer service toll free : (888) 401-4678
Following is a link for our acceptable use and terms of service for bluehost.com : Terms of Service
If you would like to reach our support online you may do so at the following link : Bluehost Support

When/If you call our support help line, please have your site name ready.

Re:What?

[ReverendLoki]

I think the forum was hosted in Bulgaria. I didn't realize they were a land of the free, too...

And that would be a "fact" garnered from the same article that got all those other "facts" correct. A quote from the article linked in the news blurb above:

The article also claims that the site was Bulgarian, which it isn't. The company that designed the website is based on Bulgaria, but it is hosted and maintained in the US.

From the form

[FooAtWFU]

From the form:By filling out and submitting this form you authorize AFP and its agents and/or representatives to contact you (via e-mail, phone, and/or mail) about its products and related services, including announcements of special promotions.

spamspamspamspamspam!

more info

[webwench_72]

Kuja's posting on gamefaqs, with responders' posts:
http://boards.gamefaqs.com/gfaqs/genmessage.php?bo ard=2000075&topic=25527152&page=0

One of the metalgearsolid.org's admins tells his story here:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s= &threadid=1777029&highlight=metalgearsolidorg