Sometimes this comes from well-intentioned people who aren't observant enough to notice what's unusual about the story. "So some rich lady fell down some stairs in her one-story house somehow and her gambling-addicted nephew inherits all her money. So basically, somebody died. Big deal. People die every day! There was a story just yesterday about a guy who had a heart attack during the Super Bowl. There's nothing new under the sun, folks. Death happens! I don't know why you're so shocked!"

That might be a bit extreme, but a lot of simple people can oversimplify a story so that in summary, of course it sounds like a cliche. A story about Gaddafi's excesses? "Oh, boy, a dictator being eccentric and insane, like we haven't heard that before." Only when he's actually in the process of being overthrown, and these things are directly fueling the anger of the people overthrowing him, it seems kind of relevant what specific things are riling them up.

AP, via The Guardian

Like this stupid couch he bought for his daughter.

But worse than the well-intentioned people are the people who think that posting news stories is some kind of contest where you try to shock other people, and the least shocked person is the "winner." They see being shocked or disturbed or surprised as an admission of weakness, and will respond to an Internet snuff film by saying, "Well, that's not nearly as bad as that chainsaw one. You mean you guys have never heard of it?"

Shock hipsters are the worst hipsters.

I think it's a bit hypocritical to jump on people for "judging" since we all make some level of judgment if the story is shocking enough. The kind of "judging" that bothers me is when the person literally acts like a judge that has been given this case and everything depends on them making a ruling.

You know what I mean, when a person starts out saying, "Well, it's hard to make a call here, and we really don't have all the facts, but ..." and goes on to list the pros and cons, and draw a conclusion about who the guilty party is. If it's hard to make a call, you don't have to make a call. Of course everybody's entitled to their opinion, but these people aren't acting like they are letting their natural reactions out, they're acting like they really don't want to judge, but someone has begged them to do it and they must heed the call. The Internet needs them, and they can't let it down.

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"It's my CIVIC DUTY!"

If you are that kind of person, then as a member of the Internet, I officially inform you that the Internet Court relieves you of your duties. You are now free to act on your own. Next time you run into a news story that's hard to judge, feel free to say, "Well, it's hard to make a call here, and we really don't have the facts," and then stop. You are freed from your judicial obligations and can go spend more time arguing about video games or something.

The worst thing is that when drawing the good guy/bad guy lines, it always seems to be a zero-sum game. One side has to be good and one side has to be bad, so you can take sides! Make posters! Chant slogans! Make pithy sarcastic quips! If both sides are morally flawed, but one side bears more liability than the other, it's hard to really sum that up on a bumper sticker or scathing signature.

This mentality really shows whenever you bring up flaws in one party's actions, like "The kid shouldn't have been putting ice cream down people's pants in the first place." Then some people will jump up and say, "Oh, so you're saying he deserved to get beaten up? You're saying the bullies were saints? You're saying they did the world a favor? THE KID IS IN THE HOSPITAL AND YOU ARE CONDONING THIS?" I mean, come on. If one side is shown to be more wrong than you thought, it doesn't automatically make the other side less wrong. You don't have to subtract the wrongness from the other column, it's not a fucking math problem.

Some people just want any controversial story to fit into the pattern of villain vs. saint, so if you're finding any flaws in one party, you must be trying to turn them into the villain, and logically, turning the other side into the saint. But so many stories are two "villains" trying to screw each other over, or a bunch of bumbling "saints" coming to blows because of a pile of misunderstandings.

Likewise, the next person can't just go, "Yeah, dismemberment, I'm good with that," lest they sound complacent. "No, that's too good for him!" they'll say. "I hope he's skinned alive and rolled around in some gravel and run over by a truck, and then they revive him with cutting edge medical advances so that he can have his intestines force fed to him after they are set on fire."

I understand people have to express some kind of strong emotional response to horrible crimes, but I think there's a difference between your actual feelings and the feelings you come up with after you see where other people's feelings are setting the bar. If you're telling other people that their revenge fantasies aren't good enough and one-upping them with your own, you may have crossed that line.

Sometimes the same thing happens without the violence, where people compete with each other to come up with the most derisive jokes. Like if there's a story about a stupid politician saying something stupid, people might just constantly one-up each other with generic "stupid" jokes, like, "He's so stupid it takes him an hour to make minute rice," or "He's so stupid he got run over by a parked car!" And while he is stupid, nobody ends up talking about the stupid thing he said, or what its effect is going to be, because they're too busy showing each other that they're much smarter than that stupid politician.

A lot of stories hit the press with very few details at first. Say a cop tazes a student at X University. It happened near the cafe. That's all we know. The rather irresponsible student paper publishes it immediately. Soon it's on blogs all over the country.

One group of people will imagine this poor student just having a cup of coffee at the cafe when the cop came by and tazed him because he "looked at him funny," while another group of people will imagine the student walking around stone-faced, throwing grenades left and right until the cop heroically stopped him by nonlethal means. Then they'll jump straight into arguing.

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To lighten the mood, imagine him launching the grenades from this old-fashioned contraption.

"So you're saying it's OK for a cop to taze someone sitting peacefully at a cafe just because he's nearsighted?" "So YOU'RE saying the cop should have just lay down and let him grenade the whole campus, so he wouldn't hurt his feelings?" "It's an outrage this cop got off scot-free!" "Scot-free!? I'm sure he was executed."

Either of those scenarios are theoretically possible given the lack of facts, but not very likely. People can be very creative on the internet, which is sometimes a good thing and sometimes creepy. I think the imaginative details are filled in from two sources. One is fiction -- movies, books, TV, etc. People might explain how this person can't be convicted because of such-and-such law, and then if you ask them if they saw that on Law & Order they will cough a lot or whatever the Internet equivalent is.

The other source is their personal experiences. A setup for a news story might perfectly mirror some experience the reader had, like a bicyclist getting hit by a car might remind them of when they were run over by a road-raging maniac. Their first inclination isn't to ask if the bicyclist ran a red light or if the driver saw them, because their intuition will tell them this is another one of those maniacs. If it was a really personal experience, they might see any doubts about the victim as attacks on themselves.

Even if you're not that emotionally involved, there are all kinds of assumptions about people who live in certain areas or dress a certain way or own certain things that lead you to assume more facts than the story contains. "Well, this took place in a trailer park, so I really doubt he bothered to wrap up his wiring. I'm sure the fire was his fault."

Sometimes the answer to a perceived injustice isn't "We need a law!" but taking some time to study and figure out what's wrong with the system and where you can work to fix it. Or just praying desperately that the acquitted criminal will rob a hotel room someday.