Thats fine, I am nothing if not a kind man and a gentleman at that.
In seriousness though, I don’t think thats the issue. Thing is, none of us know.
-If- Swifty is guilty they deserve punishment.
-If- his accuser is lying, they too deserve punishment.
Now people bang on about false accusations (Which I totally believe can and do happen), but these things have to be investigated fully, and by people who are qualified to do so.
None of those people are us. As I say, the people investigating are not -allowed- to talk about it. Same way as Jurors are not allowed to talk about the cases they hear whilst serving on a Jury (Although I bet some of them do…)
However, The law (at least in the UK, I can’t speak for everywhere) does protect people who have been falsely accused, to the extent that the false accuser rather than being told “You silly person, what were you thinking!” can be sent to jail. In fact there was a court case last year where an accusation was made, was found incontrovertibly false, and the false accuser did indeed face some serious jail time. So it isn’t as simple as saying “If a man gets accused they’re automatically guilty” When it rather patently is not the case.
Now, the seperate issue is that of reputation. The problem there, is that it ceases to be a legal issue, but a media issue.
How did all of us know about the Swifty thing? Did the Court issue a statement to all WoW gamers? Nope. It was a media issue.
Media is this horribly fickle beast that feeds on itself (Ironically Streamers are part of this process themselves) In that it will screech about how horrible something is, then turn and screech about how horrible it is that people are pre-judging a person (which is horrible, I’m not denying that, it should investigated, but not under public excoriation) because thats what -sells-.
The only thing people love more than a scandal, is being told they should be outraged about a scandal.
I didn’t even know about this Scandal, to me, Swifty was some (expletive not included!) who crashed my server years ago. It was ages ago, I’d almost forgotten about it. I didn’t even know they were still a ‘thing’ until suddenly it is all over the General Forums. Basically -we- are feeding the beast. -We- (and I include myself in this) are making it a thing, when it could be baseless accusations, or it could indeed be true.
Blizzard removed an NPC from the game. Wow. So What? They do that a lot, as it happens. It only became an issue because suddenly everyone is banging on about it. They removed an NPC from a game based on a person who is facing some pretty severe accusations, distancing themselves from the process, which is actually a corporately responsible thing to do, and a thing that businesses worldwide do, if there is a pending investigation. If the investigation totally exonerates Swifty, then they’ll probably reinstate the NPC, same way as Businesses have reinstated sponsorship deals with celebrities if they have been unfairly accused of something.
Thing is, because the accusations are of an incredibly emotive nature, involving accusations that we rightly should take seriously, suddenly everyone has an opinion, which only makes things worse, because suddenly it gets blown up. This is why in every post on this subject I have -always- said “I don’t know the facts, -you- (The generic you, not you personally Galaxyk) don’t know the facts, so lets wait and see?”
Basically this arguing is actually making it harder for people to stay objective and ultimately making it -more- likely that this person’s reputation will be forever tarnished with the accusation.
I hope that makes sense, like I say, we’re not well informed enough to say “This happened” or “This didn’t happen”.