Kulturkampf

[HaughtyFrank]

We call upon your government to establish a full independent public inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the treatment and death of Jason Arday: into the conduct of the institutions involved; the warnings given concerning his vulnerability; the decisions taken after those warnings; and, above all, the interaction between the legacy media and the digital attention systems with which they have become coupled. However, even before this is done the CPS should be examining the matter, and the police should be impounding computers. This is not an attack upon a free press—it is a necessarily immediate defence of one. Nor is this an attempt to establish Jason Arday's innocence of allegations concerning plagiarism and other academic misconduct: on this matter we need to be absolutely clear: He may not have been innocent. Be that as it may, every single person who contributed to the harassment of Arday should now be feeling guilty, which in turn should—quite possibly for the first time in their lives—give them the basic orientation necessary to understand that: you don't have to be innocent to possess a right not to be collectively destroyed.

People are also.mad that the NYTimes released an article after his death that posed additional questions about his stories, even citing classmates who said that Arday was perfectly verbal as a child

There was also a really in depth audition process at Cambridge that for some reason picked Arday over more experienced, women of color, candidates