I honestly see the paparazzi photo scene as comparable to child porn (obviously, lesser, but on the same scale). Here we have a mass market of seemingly ordinary people consuming violations of other people in a way that makes it clear they don't see the victims as other than a source of titillation, an industry that serves this content up to them out of pure asocial greed, and these photographers actually going out there and committing the violations, because it's fun and the money is good if you don't have a working conscience and can depersonalize your prey. Each blames the others.
While I agree the voyeurism is distasteful and a blatant violation of privacy, in my mind the more egregious aspect comes from the written content accompanying the photos -- The faux narrative about the rich and famous that twists reality into a narcissistic and somewhat psychopathic social order which people try to emulate. Their fictitious stories perpetuate copy-cat behavior from the lower and middle classes yearning to reach the rubicon of celebritydom, leaving a vacuous and cruel chunk of society brainwashed by sadistic fairy-tails.
Regarding your analogy: I still never had it explained to me who pays child-porn producers.
The economics of invasive celebrity photography go like this: companies pay (down-market) advertisers to get them name recognition; those advertisers pay tabloids for ad-space; the tabloid pays paparazzi for a hook to go on the cover.
Do the producers actually get paid, from some kind of market, or do they do it to on their own (like "amateur pornography") and just share it / leak it? The moral issues and the huge risks involved seem to big for people to go into that professionally and I can't imagine any viable market.
Secondary sources might get paid for access of course -- or might even not, all those stories in the media always talk about forums / clubs etc. and people exchanging stuff, not so much paying for it.
I know the supply side of the economy exists; the Russian mafia apparently does quite a bit of child-porn production, and probably it's not because they're a bunch of pedophiles.
I'm just not sure where the demand side is. Like you said, I've also never heard of child porn "consumers" who weren't just trading the "amateur" videos created by others in the same groups.
From another angle: jump on Tor and you can find places to buy stolen credit cards, hire hit-men, or order drugs within 15 minutes. But you'll never encounter a "put Bitcoins in, get illegal pornography out" page. Is this sort of stuff just really well hidden (which I doubt, given the Streisand Effect); or is it a semi-backwards "industry" that avoids using the Internet for anything; or what?
CP seems to be the one thing that's sufficiently illegal and unpopular that it will be banned from all message boards and hosts except those dedicated to it. So it doesn't get the Streisand Effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ore is a good reference: CP was being sold fairly openly from a website, and it and every single credit-card-holder found in its customer database was raided. Subsequently it appears that a number of those CC holders hadn't actually bought it themselves, but had had their card stolen.
I've also heard reports of 'sharing rings' that require the user to maintain an upload/download ratio, rather like the regular piracy torrent community and old BBSs. These are particularly dangerous as they're incentivising the making of new "content" (ie committing horrible traumatising abuse).
I'll only read this if someone copies it and pastes it to another site with the title "12 Crazy Reasons Why the Fast Times Of The Paparazzi Came to a Halt."
Nice that Buzzfeed is doing journalism. Shitty that it's funded off of their content theft...
It's true. There's definitely a noticeable segment of bitter Reddit users who complain "they stole that content from Reddit", blissfully unaware of the irony that most of the things "stolen" from Reddit often didn't originate on Reddit either, but they like to squawk about BuzzFeed (as it's only theft when it happens -to- Reddit).
Maybe, but my negative view of BuzzFeed has nothing to do with Reddit since I barely go there. It's more the fact that BuzzFeed is the tabloid of the internet.
> Their newsroom has attracted some pretty big names as of late.
Considering that pretty much all of traditional journalism is now chasing Buzzfeed in style, it doesn't matter if you work for Buzzfeed or the imitators, you'll still be working at a place with the same basic approach. You might as well work at the one that is making the model work, rather than the ones that have latched on to it as the most recent attempt to slow their downward spiral.
As other users have pointed out, it's not particularly rare, because they produce good articles semi-regularly. We were discussing this the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10405992.
Sites that are mostly junk but also put out the occasional good story are a significant problem for HN. We can't ban them, because losing good stories is worse than tolerating bad ones (the latter are annoying, but get flagged). Our solution is to penalize them, review the stories, and take the penalty off the good ones. The next step will hopefully be to distribute the review process to the community.
Stars make a disproportionate amount because of their popularity; the same attachment that raises their value, goes along with the attention towards their private life. If popularity wouldn't generate such attention, they wouldn't certainly get such amounts of money.
They make lots of money by deliberately signing themselves up for privacy violations. The relation between celebrities and paparazzi is symbiotic, not parasitic, despite what the former sometimes say (or some even think). It's how popularity manifests and grows, and popularity is what celebrities make money on.
Except they don't sign up for privacy violations. They sign up to make music, or act in films, or whatever it is they do.
I'm sure some famous people purposefully encourage paparazzi to follow them, but certainly not all of them. You must have noticed how most of the photos coming from paparazzi feature someone who's famous in particular circles looking pissed off at a gaggle of photographers following them around as they go to the shops with a hangover.
So are you saying that anyone who makes music for a living cares more about money than privacy? That there isn't anyone who would prefer to be able to entertain onstage and live a private life offstage, even if it reduces their income?
Half the responses in this subthread seem to be from people who honestly believe that every actor and musician and athlete cares about money above all else and deserves any consequences of that drive, and it's just really bizarre.
I don't mean they care about money above everything else, not in a condescending way. I only mean that lack of privacy is a part of being a celebrity, and it is a fact about the nature of things, whether anyone likes it or not. Privacy issues come with the territory.
>How dare they successfully make music for a living, and expect their family to live normal lives! The arrogance.
How dare they successfully make crappy music for a living, beating the shit out of the art of music, and willingly watering down their offerings, while at the same time selling themselves as sex symbols and teenage idols, oftentimes willingly cooperating and provoking the media for cheap publicity, and expect their family to live normal lives!
This is an incredibly dangerous position, all the more dangerous because it doesn't seem so. Fundamentally you are dehumanizing someone. You are denying someone the protections of civilized society, you are refusing to empathize with someone else's suffering. Because their status as famous and/or rich obviates the need for compassion.
And yet, is that even remotely true? Does being rich and famous make someone so much happier and immune from suffering that a little extra suffering here and there (such as invasions of privacy by the paparazzi) still results in net less suffering than the average person? Every indication seems to point toward that not being the case in the vast majority of cases. And there are many indications that the cost of fame can indeed result in significant suffering, as many high profile suicides and overdoses after long battles with drug addiction testify.
Celebrities are just people, they should be treated as such.
It's a shitty thing and it's a net positive if it goes away. You are free to use your time and energy to pursue those other things that you think are more pressing.
"It's cool being a celebrity but I'd still like to be able to go outside without some tubby dude with a camera trying to piss me off so he can sell a video clip of me acting angry to TMZ so a bunch of people can make fun of me."
But that is how you make money! That TMZ makes people talk about you, which makes it more likely they'll show up on your concert / performance, buy your CDs or whatever.
"Gentleman of above-average girth, who might weight more than the average person in our skinny-normative society but still has feelings, y'know, and it's hard to get McDonald's burger juice off of a white shirt if you're out for the night trying to get Lindsay Lohan to do something embarrassing and you don't have time to, like, do laundry, and so would just appreciate it if you wouldn't make a big deal about the way he looks while he's busy making fun of other people."
> "I didn't think that becoming a celebrity would screw up my private life," said no one ever.
I've actually seen lots of people say that (and, even more often, seen people say that they didn't expect the thing they did that led to their celebrity to lead to celebrity and then screw up their private life.)
> Little more than a decade ago, stars like Paris Hilton would “inadvertently” leak their plans to the paparazzi — part of the wink-wink symbiotic relationship that fueled their tabloid fame. But what once took an army of clamoring paparazzi can now be tweeted, Instagrammed, Snapchatted, and Vined.
Guilty, all of them.