Terry Prone: Acceptability of a prank depends upon status of the victim, if there is one
MTU student, 21-year-old Ukrainian-born Vlad, who goes by Rendy Vlad online, uses Ray-Ban Meta glasses to record himself ‘pranking’ people.
Last week was the height of it, as it always is. The first of April is the annual feast day for pranksters.
In this particular case, the offering that got most attention was that provided by Wicklow GAA, which provoked Social Democrat TD Jennifer Whitmore and Fine Gael Tánaiste Simon Harris to roundly condemn whoever posted it.
They might even have squarely condemned it, but the geometry of the posting wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that someone thought it was funny to refer to female members as equals in the use of Echelon Park (the county grounds, where women’s teams struggle to access facilities).
In fairness, it was speedily taken down, but not before it had sparked a controversy arguably out of proportion to the original prank. It’s not as if it had put the whole nation in stitches.
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It was solemnly unfunny from the start, although it did not break every unwritten rule of decency and privacy, as did another prankster’s efforts, reported in this paper by Emer Walsh.
This merry prankster is a 21-year-old Munster Technological University student of computer science originally from Ukraine, named Vlad, who has more than a million followers on TikTok.
According to Ms Walsh, Vlad defines himself as a ‘Point of View Prankster’. He uses Ray-Ban Meta glasses. You know those things that a look like ordinary spectacles in particularly ugly frames? Them.
Handy yokes that allowed him to film a woman getting attention from emergency services in Cork City and then being put into an ambulance.
When this posting led to a backlash, TikTok properly took it down on the basis that they don’t allow “harassing, degrading, or bullying behaviour”.
Problem solved, you might think, but you would be wrong, because the harassing, degrading, and bullying behaviour is still on Instagram, where our merry prankster “never deletes anything”.
Which means that the front page, above the fold story in the would have provided Vlad’s admirers with the information allowing them to post the thing all over the place, thus exemplifying the serial killer nature of social media.
If it doesn’t get you one way, it gets you another way, and mainstream media, in reporting — as it should — anti-social public communication, becomes part of a vicious circle.
But let’s be clear. In this instance, the vicious circle was started by the Meta smart glasses, about which the Data Protection Commission has expressed grave concern, although Meta maintains it’s clear to anybody when the glasses are recording because they have an LED light that turns itself on in that situation.
And then, Meta righteously adds that its service users — like Vlad, although they don’t specify any users by name — are responsible for complying with the law wherever they are and for using the glasses “in a safe, respectful manner”.
Of course they are. But if they manage to slip the surly bonds of the law and fail to use the glasses as recommended, if they post something so horribly invasive that TikTok takes it down, then Meta, which owns Instagram, does not do the same.
By the way, the “our glasses light up so you can always tell if you’re being filmed” rationale is the greatest load of bull.
Let’s say you suddenly get chest pains or find it difficult to breathe, dial 999 and an ambulance arrives, paramedics at the ready to take care of you.
Imagine, though, that one of the gawkers, is wearing glasses and those glasses have a teeny tiny light at the side.
The chances are pretty small that you will realise, in the middle of a medical emergency, that this gawker is a merry prankster invading your privacy for their own benefit.
The chances are even smaller that, should you have spotted them for what they are, you might then be in a position to make them quit it.
To update that claim about it taking a village to raise a child: it takes a village to spot and deal with a high tech privacy invader, or at least a shopping centre.
We know this because Vlad also filmed himself pranking staffers in a Douglas shopping centre, although another staff member seems to have noted what was going on and intervened.
Inevitably, the person who intervened was filmed, too, although again TikTok did the right thing and took the recorded encounter down.
The acceptability of a prank or an April Fools’ Day joke is dependent upon the status of the victim, if there is one.
A victim-free example, this year, was a US police force putting “Goat Unit” on its Canine Department van and having officers use dwarf goats on leads for the day.
It was funny, caused a lot of double-takes, didn’t harm either the dogs or the goats, and gave the local TV station a ho-ho-ho at the end of its evening news bulletin.
The reported death of the oldest tortoise in the world aimed higher.
The press release, purportedly emanating from a vet specialising in the care of tortoises of advanced years, claimed that Jonathan, the 193-year old, who had outlived all of his reptile siblings within the creep, that being the collective noun for tortoises, had finally popped off to the tortoise heaven in the sky, doing so on the island of St Helena.
International media, including the newspaper and the BBC, fell for this one and, a day later, had to deny that Jonathan had snuffed it. The point here is that when an organisation is as eminent as the BBC, tweaking its dignity in a harmless way is fun.
It’s not like annoying staff in a shopping centre who are trying to go about their business, or like humiliating someone who is ill enough to be taken away in an ambulance.
Plus, the Beeb showed how to make a story out of their own red faces, developing a detailed report and delivering copious data about the still-living Jonathan.
“Jonathan’s exact age is unknown,” said the Beeb, “but a photograph taken in 1882 shows that he was fully grown when he was first brought to the island — where he lived on the grounds of Plantation House, the official residence of the governor of St Helena. Experts say this suggests he was about 50 years old by that time.”
Every day’s a school day with the BBC… although it must be admitted that they got to the real vet who genuinely takes care of Jonathan, (to the extent that the latter requires care), and found the real vet to be good and mad about the episode, because the guy impersonating him on social media was in fact looking for funds, which, according to the genuine vet, meant that this wasn’t a victimless prank, but a scam.
You can see how a vet would disapprove of garnering money on a false claim. But no tortoise was harmed in this scam.
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