At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

The four-part mini-series Mr Bates vs The Post Office is worth checking out:

> A faulty IT system called Horizon, developed by Fujitsu, creates apparent cash shortfalls that cause Post Office Limited to pursue prosecutions for fraud, theft and false accounting against a number of subpostmasters across the UK. In 2009, a group of these, led by Alan Bates, forms the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance. The prosecutions and convictions are later ruled a miscarriage of justice at the conclusion of the Bates & Others v Post Office Ltd judicial case in 2019.[4][5]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Bates_vs_The_Post_Office

What is particularly striking about the scandal is the impact of the mini-series. From what I understand (as a foreigner to the UK) is that it was the mini-series that sparked national interest in the case. Without it, those involved would still be in a bureaucratic and legal nightmare, in which all institutions rejected their innocence claims, and hardly anyone would have been held accountable. See also the "Impact" section on the linked wiki page.

It leaves me wondering how the situation would have been if it would have been a (dramaturgically) 'bad' series. It might have left those involved even worse of.

I learned a lot from The Great Post Office Trial podcast by BBC Radio 4

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-great-post-office-...

It's worth pointing out that Mr Bates vs The Post Office screened in early 2024. The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry was set up in 2020/2021 and the public hearings started in 2023.

So it may have looked like "it was TV what done it" but the wheels of justice were turning long before the show came out.

The people are still waiting for their money back and their names to be cleared. The scandal continues.

I first saw news about this scandal and the early evidence of wrong doing by the Post Office in 2008.

> It leaves me wondering how the situation would have been if it would have been a (dramaturgically) 'bad' series. It might have left those involved even worse of.

Holy shit. You might see big corps like the post office fund big dramas as a way to sway public opinion. A tool in the pr playbook.

There are other scandals in the UK, like IR35 that basically prevents worker owned businesses from making profit, then resulting cottage industry of parasitic "umbrella companies" and tumbling economy. But directly affected people are easily generalised as those with broader shoulders so the public couldn't care less if they cannot run their little businesses. Meanwhile big consultancies that lobbied for it are getting minted on public sector contracts, they have very much a monopoly now. Things are more expensive and shittier. Oh and then Boriswave - as if captive services market wasn't enough for big corporations - they also got to import the cheapest available workers instead of hiring locals.

> From what I understand (as a foreigner to the UK) is that it was the mini-series that sparked national interest in the case.

The case was done with by 2019:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bates_%26_Others_v_Post_Office...

The mini-series aired in 2024. Perhaps it was a bit more obscure pre-airing, but things were sorted out already.

Wheels; justice: all these are just weasel words. Litigation is an exclusive privilege of the rich. And prison, of the poor(er).

Sort of.

We were in the middle of an election cycle. If you were paying attention you were aware of the scandal slowly grinding its way through legal slop, but most people probably weren't that clued in (as per normal).

But that mini-series threw it into the current public consciousness, and so suddenly it wasn't just the judicial system working through it but the Tories now gave a shit (briefly), because they thought showing that they care might save them (it didn't).

The propaganda that was manufactured by the government around this was particularly clever. Most people believe the captive labour market that has been created was for the benefit of the tax payer - see the downvotes and no comments - and reject the idea that it is actually the opposite and only benefactors are big corporations. The idea that subsequent governments could be so corrupt, doesn't compute.

I suspect it’s a deliberate strategy in other venues. I see a lot of comments on HN that seem like they’re rage/troll/flame bait to cause a line of inquiry they are advancing to be flagged/downvoted, but if done as intended, their reply will be divisive enough that the troll trigger man isn’t identified as a troll, but they induce trolling in others.

Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions

Justin Cheng, Michael Bernstein, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jure Leskovec

> In online communities, antisocial behavior such as trolling disrupts constructive discussion. While prior work suggests that trolling behavior is confined to a vocal and antisocial minority, we demonstrate that ordinary people can engage in such behavior as well. We propose two primary trigger mechanisms: the individual’s mood, and the surrounding context of a discussion (e.g., exposure to prior trolling behavior). Through an experiment simulating an online discussion, we find that both negative mood and seeing troll posts by others significantly increases the probability of a user trolling, and together double this probability. To support and extend these results, we study how these same mechanisms play out in the wild via a data-driven, longitudinal analysis of a large online news discussion community. This analysis reveals temporal mood effects, and explores long range patterns of repeated exposure to trolling. A predictive model of trolling behavior shows that mood and discussion context together can explain trolling behavior better than an individual’s history of trolling. These results combine to suggest that ordinary people can, under the right circumstances, behave like trolls.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5791909/

The Guardian was reporting this for years, that I saw

Private Eye too, I hear

The TV programme made it a political football

FIFA tried to make a movie to whitewash their reputation during one of their many corruption scandals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Passions

It didn't work because it was a terrible movie and blatant propaganda, but I could see someone doing this successfully if they were more subtle about it.