That whole Q&A was just dripping with "I'm right, she's wrong". A few nice quotes: IT specialist who doesn't realise that a Youtube link can be viewed by anyone ... Seriously, he screwed up and caused the vid to go viral and then makes excuses. A normal parent would be very apologetic towards his daughter and not "tough, I didn't expect it to happen but she asked for it". Translated: going to school and studying isn't important and the fact that she wants to learn more skills (instruments) isn't either. This proves what I said earlier: he sees her as a semi-maid and believes that his job is so much tougher than what she has to do for school. That part always pissed me off big time - you spend at least as much time at school or on school work and it all gets minimised. And heck, he works in IT? IT is nothing compared to school. Translated: father did what he should have done in the first place and probably had a long talk to cool his own conscience that he may have gone overboard. This right here shows what a dick he is. He doesn't apologise for it nor seem regretful for having done it AT ALL. He basically twists his wrong doing and turns it back on her, making it about her hurting people for a long time. Except that's not how it works. Viral videos hunt you for years or even decades (like that Star Wars fat guy) but an off-the-cuff comment on Facebook is already buried after a few days or weeks. Plus you can delete it and it's gone. Viral videos you CAN'T DELETE. Someone else will just repost it. Seriously, this guy is a big asshole - no wonder his daughter is like that.

Since the father refers to his daughter's stepmother as well in the video, I'd say her parents are divorced. Now, the mother doesn't like the father enough to even be married to him (and likely vice versa) but she's still willing to take his side in this issue. I don't know if you know many divorced parents, but it's rare for one to take their ex-spouse's side over their child's side. Maybe, just maybe, this a pattern of a long term serious problem that neither parent has been able to reasonably solve. Just a thought.
He owns a business, the dude may very well work 60+ hours a week and expect not to have to clean up after his kid. I don't know how high school is in the UK but no, it's not hard here, working at McDonald's is more work than high school.
That's simply not true. If it's on the internet it's likely archived forever. Any search for her name will likely pull up any of her internet posts for decades to come.

Maybe so - here, school is from 8 till 4 or 4.30.. Then you have to study in case of pop quizzes, homework that generally takes an hour and half to do or more - Sundays are generally taken for homework as well. School really is more than a full time job here, because you take it home with you and still some parents have the weird idea that school is fun time.

If he has his own business then that's his choice. Thing remains that a job isn't the most important thing in the world. The US obsesses far too much about their kids getting a job. Here, we generally work for one month a year during summer holidays to make some money and that's it - school comes first and work generally means fixed work hours which doesn't go well with tests. In my free time, I had hobbies that got me the job I have today so free time to explore who you are is important anyway and a job just makes this a lot harder to do if you ask me.

But heck, in the end - I just don't like the guy. He brushes away his massive mistake and then blows up her mistakes. The fact that he basically goes "she did it first!" except she didn't do it before millions AND she's a teenager but that's too hard for him to grasp it seems. It's the typical attitude of someone who refuses to admit they're wrong and if he was my father, he'd drive me up the walls too. It's highly frustrating to known you're in the right but your parent(s) won't see it and after time, it erodes your relationship to a point where bitterness grows between each other.

EDIT: and the reason he pisses me off, is because my stepfather was a great deal like him. Always pushing me to do chores, telling me I was being lazy and thinking school was an entire day of relaxing. I did a ton of chores around the house and never got a thank you, was taken for granted and still got a lot of shit. He was also incapable of being wrong and when he screwed up, he'd act exactly like this.
No it won't. Private profile, look it up. For the people who are her friends, they'd have to dig through all her posts to find it which is highly unrealistic. Oh, and you ignored the point where she could delete it.

well I called it harmless because it was still something that a person might do, with no harmful intent to it. I have no idea if Vestin intended harm , but you seem sure of it since you obviously had a bad past with him
Personally I don't get it.

That private profile has been archived as well. FB actively sells that shit to its partners and pre-employment background checks are big business. Don't think just because you cannot pull up Google and see it (at least not right now) that it isn't available now (or very soon), you'd be wrong. On FB she's the product as are all of the material she posts there. FB doesn't throw away their product into a black hole just because someone marked it "private".

Now you're making up excuses. You might as well say that anything written in an e-mail can come to haunt you because the CIA screens them *facepalms* You said ANY SEARCH FOR HER NAME and that's simply not true.

Not to mention that FB doesn't dish out private posts to a company because they ask - you've been watching too much X-Files. FB sells large databanks to corporations for marketing means, yes, but I've never heard of that including posts and even if it did, you're really grasping at straws there because, what is the chance of the company she applies for having bought such info? Really, this point is just ludicrous - what she posts on Facebook is just going to get buried 99.9% of the time if not more.

I've had private emails posted to peoples' websites and later archived before. I learned a valuable lesson when that happened. You should assume anything posted on the internet is there forever. If you don't want to, that's fine. But yes, I really do believe her posts are out there and out there for good. As well, I know we call them "viral videos" but anything can actually go viral on the internet, her letter could have, his video did. There's very little difference. You're using post facto bias to say one was worse than the other, I'm not sure there's any rational reason to believe that's true, however.

Don't mean to butt in on your conversation, however what you say is completely correct - I know, that once something is on the internet, it is there forever - I will never put any photo of myself, or anyone I know, on any website, because I know how easy it is for a photo to be 'copied'. Next thing you'll find is your face on some porno site!

Yes, I know I am paranoid, but this is life.

You honestly say that you don't believe there's a major difference in odds here? Honestly? You're incapable of seeing how a pretty normal Facebook vent from a teenager would be far less likely to go viral than a father who takes his time to make a video on Youtube where he SHOOTS A LAPTOP? HONESTLY? You call that bias? It's called common sense. Maybe next you'll be telling me that making a simple remark on Twitter how you like peanut butter has the same chance as going viral as making a vid of covering yourself in peanut butter and and have every stray dog in the city running after you.

That's how far apart the two were - and to claim her letter had even the tiniest chance of becoming a viral just tells me you don't know how the internet works. Sorry, but that's the only conclusion I can draw here. People don't give a shit about these things unless they're embarrassing (*points at Youtube vid*), funny, something very different or anything else that makes it stick out. So no, NOT anything can go viral.

It has nothing to do with going viral and everything to do with an employer searching through your online identity for profiling, and trust me, it does happen and I've had first hand experience with it.

Posting shit about her parents means that there's a high chance he'll post shit about one of her future employees, or of one of her teachers, and there's when things go south really fast during an informal background check.

As for private profile, she didn't use that, she was just hiding the respective post from her parents.

Finally, if you consider the whole Q&A to be dripping with "I'm right, she's wrong" then I guess you already have a strong dislike for the guy so nothing will change how you view the events.

I for one, stand behind him 100%.

I love it that he has advertising on his video.

Hell, with 18+ million views it didn't turn out bad for him. So in a sense you could say that his daughter provided some income in the end. :P

On the subject of what is more private, Facebook or YouTube. I would go for neither. You can't actually know what post or video will turn viral or generate thousands of views. There are tones of videos with a couple hundred views and post on facebook forgotten right after they were made.
And then there is something like that parent where both the post (which was copied and shared, so too late to delete it now) and the video went viral and everybody knows. Both of them, when they first made their thoughts public, expected that only few friends would be interested in them.
But for some reason that eludes me, they were wrong.

If she did not use a private profile (and honestly, how in gods name does blocking someone work if your profile is not set to private? someone explain this to me?) then you got a point. I was under the impression she had because of the above.

And heck, he's a guy who shoots a laptop to humiliate her in front of her friends. I'm sorry, but of course I don't like him. He's supposed to be the adult and yet he destroys hardware which lots of poor kids would be happy to have not to mention all the school work she may have had on there. He's a DICK, full stop. That final paragraph I quoted is just obviously him trying to shift the blame, come on. He even capitalised "Dad" - shows what a god complex he has ...
Youtube is still less private for many reasons. I honestly never found Facebook entries while Googling. You can find people and groups but not posts or it's rare anyway. However, Google DOES track comments made in Youtube vids so because of that, it's obviously less private. Make your Facebook profile private and it's much harder to find any info. Next to that, Youtube uses a tag system so related vids are shown at the side meaning that that guy's vid could always have shown up next to other vids. No-one is going to be posting on Facebook and a post of that girl showing up on the side for them to read. Honestly, common sense.

Again, you can't claim with a straight face that the letter she wrote could go viral. And yes, future employees can use Facebook but all that is just a smoke screen from that idiot dad to make people look the other way to cover up his own stupidity. He's turning it around to say "look, I did you a favour because now you know what a bad thing it can do". Cunt.

I'm too lazy to go through the whole thread, but has anybody considered that this is all fake? I mean, that wouldn't be the first "viral video" that look geniue only to be a decent marketing ploy.

So far there seems to be a pretty heated discussion, which looks to me that people take this seriously. Personally I'm a bit cautious about this. The setting, the hat, the accent, that is just a but to perfect.

So that's all I am gonna hear? "You got no kids, wait till you have some."
I will repeat once again; advocating against shooting a laptop to get even with a kid is not idealistic.

In the meantime you who have kids think about this; this dad is shooting a laptop to get even with his 15 year old kid. Do you really think it is healthy behaviour? Do you really think this is a first? This attitude doesn't come out of nowhere. I am not saying if your a good father your kid willl be good. I am saying when you are shooting shit your kid is likely to be looking up at you. I am saying when you are a bad father your kid will likely fuck up.
And I am idealistic because I am advocating against this?

Anything on the internet could be faked so I always take anything with some size of grain of salt, but ultimately the argument is about the concepts and values, and the realness of the situation may not matter all that much.