me_irl

Sure, but there are plenty of times that "opinion's popularity as decided by mob vote" is a poor proxy for anything but how palatable the opinion is.

I'll usually check the responses to see if there's anyone responding/refuting with substance and/or sources, but there are plenty of times where responses to unpopular opinions are just ad hominem of the poster, and ridiculous hypotheticals that would obviously change the situation to anyone sane being posted with the assumption that it won't matter to the person who posted the unpopular opinion.

Like a few years ago there was a news article going around with increasingly emotionally charged headlines, about how a young woman had an illegal abortion and she and her mother got arrested for it after police got evidence of their IMs from Facebook.

There was a ton of people getting up in arms about many aspects of the case due to the politics of it all without looking at the facts of what occurred.

• Facebook lied about IM privacy and encryption.
  • No, Facebook never claimed their IMs were end to end encrypted.
• Facebook willingly offered up private information to the police because they're anti-abortion.
  • No, they were subpoena'd and since they had the specific information requested they legally had to comply.
• The police overreached by subpoena-ing private communications.
  • The victims admitted on the record to police that they used Facebook Messenger to plan and coordinate the abortion. To not subpoena that info after that admission would be negligence in investigation.
• They were forced to get do this illegally because all abortion is illegal in their state.
  • No, abortion is/was legal in their state up until the beginning of the last trimester. They had many months to take care of it the right way.
• It doesn't matter how late they did it.
  • Legally it does, and from the standpoint of human life, it was done two months after a fetus is considered viable outside of the mother.
• Safety of potential mother's life.
  • Surely it would have been safer to get it done safely with proper medical supervision during the 5 month period it was legal than to wait until month 7 and intentionally overdose on meds to make it happen.
• What happened to these women is still horrible and not acceptable.
  • No argument there, but at some point there has been some bare minimum amount of personal responsibility. Not like there wasn't many options to prevent things from getting so dire.
    • Use protection.
    • Use day after pill.
    • Get the abortion during the 5 months it was legal to have done so.
    • If you do it illegally, don't discuss plans over systems that can be subpoena'd.
    • Whatever you fucking do, don't fucking talk to cops. For fucks sake. Like bare goddamn minimum.
    • If you somehow fail at all if the above, don't have IMs so ridiculously useful to the prosecution as saying you're looking forward to being done so you can wear normal jeans again.

From personal experience, any comments touching upon any of these points were dog piled because it was also right around the time of the Row v Wade repeal, so emotions were justifiably running high.