Jack Thompson has been making waves this week, riding a lawsuit against Facebook back into the mainstream media.

Thompson’s multi-million dollar lawsuit against Facebook is based on the disbarred lawyer’s findings, “nearly five weeks ago,” of “Jack Thompson Groups” spread across the social networking site, which he claims advocate violence and harassment against him. Thompson stated that, at the time, three different letters to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did not result in the removal of these groups, which, in light of the company’s quick removal of “Should Barack Obama Be Killed” polls, only served to further incense Thompson.

Bloomberg and the Huffington Post are among the mainstream media outlets to pick up Jack’s suit, which he announced in an email on Tuesday, September 29. In the dispatch he labeled videogame “news sites,” including GamePolitics specifically, as “terror sites.”

An email from Thompson sent this morning, under the headline “Instant Confirmation from Around the Globe that Jack Thompson’s Suit against Facebook Is a Winner,” trumpets coverage of the case on both “reputable” news and videogame websites as proof  of “not only why the lawsuit had to be brought but why it will succeed.”

GP: Frankly, Thompson crowing victory as a result of the widespread coverage he received is among the reasons we didn’t report on the story as it developed. Is he still relevant to the gaming industry? It’s this editor’s opinion that he is not, at least when dealing in generalities. For now, as a way to move forward with this subject, GP will simply qualify coverage of any Jack story on a case-by-case basis. What do the GP readers think?

A South Korean academic's campaign to encourage friendly online communications has spread to China.

Writing for China Daily, Professor Min Byoung-chul of Korea's Chung Ang University describes some of the issues which led him to create the Sunfull Movement in May of 2007. Sunfull translates to "good replies."

Min ranks violent video games among the causes of negative online behavior and asserts that adolescents who have been exposed to violence are the "main culprits of negative comments":

With one of the world's lowest birth rates, there are more one child families in S.Korea than before, and children are becoming incapable of communicating with others.

 

The development of the gaming industry has created an addiction for these lonely children. Most games focus on stimulating plots like violence and murder rather than on educational methods for their humanity. Therefore, teenage gamers became familiar with instant killing in these games. Some of them confuse the real world with violent games and this confusion leads to replicating violent actions and criminal behavior in the real world.

 

In this regard, adolescents who have accessed obscenity and violence on the web easily become offensive and thoughtless rather than considerate to the people they encounter in the Internet. They are the main culprits of negative comments.

This phenomenon is in line with the rise of virtual violence, which includes mobile phone bullying and strange murders without motives.