Arizona starts using Facebook and Twitter to publicly shame 'Deadbeat Dads'

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Sounds great in practice… unless you’re in middle/high school, have a deadbeat parent and everyone there starts retweeting the one with your parent on it :pensive:

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My question is, do they remove them if the person gets caught up with their payments? Social media posts can live forever. It would suck to not get a job just because you got behind on your payments years ago and your background check online shows up with such a post.

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well given the nature of the internet I guess Boing Boing isn’t going to remove it’s post or any other site reposting the content won’t bother to remove (and I certainly wouldn’t expect them to) therefore once it’s posted it is going to be on your permanent record.

luckily you won’t know that you didn’t get the job because you were singled out by the state in 2016 because you will just be quietly filtered out by HR before you get to the interview.

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Add that to the many problems / issues that Arizona [land of the sunburnt] has.

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Welcome to the panopticon.

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I hope the people featured are actually deserving of the title, and not victims of circumstance and/or vindictive exes.

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I don’t have all the deets, so take my opinion with a barrel of salt. Since what I’ve read says “child support” and not spousal/alimony, I’d put my bet on these being legit and not vindictiveness. *

* Source: I know way too many divorced people.

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Two words: namespace collisions. Sucks to share a common name. (On the other hand, plausible deniability.)

Also, it is a bit too easy to get in massive debts. I saw such cases, one still owes me money…

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I was in county jail with a deadbeat dad once. He was a jerk. He ate his breakfast supernaturally fast and proceeded to drop a deuce while the rest of us were trying to finish that awful meal. Needless to say a lot of people were not happy. I didn’t feel bad when he was beaten up by the other inmates that afternoon. I’m not sure if I felt that way more because he ruined my breakfast or more because my dad was a deadbeat too…

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I know people who lost their job and were either unemployed or severely underemployed and fell behind with child support. There is no way one could pay the old rate with the new job/no job.

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It sucks. It reeeally does. And it is often not fair (wanna hear my sob story again?). But if you are a dad, your only job is to hustle for your kids.

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I sometimes wonder about how the issue of abortion applies here. Is a man a deadbeat if he didn’t want the woman to keep the child? Does the term “deadbeat” ever apply to women?

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Yes, if he refuses to help raise a child he helped to create because the mother doesn’t want an abortion.

Abortions are not the father’s call to make.

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And when they put you in jail for nonsupport, it makes it just that much more difficult to pay up, since employers aren’t fond of hiring someone just out of jail.

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Likewise. What about deadbeat Moms? I’m not saying it’s frequent, but it happens. Law of statistics says it has to happen a few times, so what about them? What works for one should work for the other under this ‘if you can’t then we will shame you and harass you’ methodology?

Also… what if you just happened to share a name with a guy on their list? Paperwork and beurocracy are infinitely dumber than what one takes as ‘common sense.’ Say some guy three states over with my name is six months behind on giving his kids anything at all, but oh hey for some sodding reason my picture and name and everything gets put on facebook as being a deadbeat, and that gets ‘liked’ and shared and suddenly I’m tarred and damned by a brush intended for someone else.

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I’m inclined to agree with your first sentence, Daneel.
Would you see the disparity continuing after birth? What I mean is, would surrendering the child for adoption be a decision only she could make?

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There is this pernicious myth that anything on the internet lives forever.

Yet, anyone who has been surfing it for decades has seen first hand link rot at minimum.

I propose a new maxim: Stuff posted to the internet can live forever *in internet time

*a number of undefined years

Facial recognition changes the game somewhat, but still, unless you end up as a public figure, or a part of a meme, it will probably go away eventually.

Now, also realistically, you should behave as though stuff that makes it on the internet will last forever. Because this is not assured that it will go away. But, really, probably it will go away if you’re Joe/Jane Private Citizen.

I’ve seen too much stuff disappear to truly believe that leaked internet content is eternal. There’s even stuff I’ve witnessed disappear from archive.org, for pete’s sake!

Absolutely. His choice to participate in a child’s conception = his responsibility to provide at least half the resources to raise it if one is in fact conceived from that choice. If he doesn’t want to have a child, either remain celibate or use a condom and make sure his partner uses some form of birth control before agreeing to sex. If those measures fail, he took that chance and must live with the consequences, which are up to the woman so long as only she can bear the child which is part of her body, his body’s role being over. If he needs virtually absolute certainty he won’t impregnate her, it’s his job to obtain a vasectomy (reversible or otherwise). Sex is awesome. But it is not without responsibilities and consequences

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Well, it’s a step up from shaming single mothers, but I can’t help thinking that there must be better ways to deal with this issue. If I were a single parent, I wouldn’t want to be financially dependent on a publicly shamed and increasingly bitter ex.

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