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Tyler Clementi’s suicide, days after his roommate secretly shot and shared video of him in a sexual encounter with a man, hit the media a little over twenty-four hours ago. And now the inevitable creepy backlash has begun, on the blogs and the comment threads and some of the dustier corners of the mainstream media.

Folks are suggesting that Dharun Ravi’s prank wasn’t such a big deal. They’re saying that things got out of hand through no fault of his own. They’re saying he doesn’t deserve the blame for Clementi’s decision to kill himself.

To these people I offer the following five gentle suggestions:

It’s not all fun and games.

There’s a simple test for whether something is a harmless joke: is everyone participating voluntarily? If you’re messing around with friends, by all means, go ahead and be a bozo. But if you’re pranking someone who didn’t sign up for your crap you’re probably being a jackass, and you should probably keep reading.

You don’t have to intend harm to do harm.

Some of Ravi’s friends at Rutgers have said he’s not anti-gay, and that he likely would have pulled the same prank if Clementi had been straight. But teasing isn’t conducted on a level playing field. Bragging on Twitter that you caught your roommate “making out with a dude,” as Ravi did, isn’t the same as bragging that you caught him with a woman. It’s not the same, and everyone knows it’s not the same, so acting like it’s the same just makes you a jackass.

There’s a lot you don’t know.

There are indications that Clementi may have been openly gay in the dorm. If so, Ravi may not have seen his Twitter post as outing Clementi at all. But “out” isn’t binary. A person may be out to some people, but not to everyone. And a person may seem to be taking your teasing in stride but actually deeply upset by it. You can’t ever know for sure how much harm you’re doing, so it’s best to err on the side of trying to do no harm at all.

The internet is forever.

We most often hear this lesson directed at potential victims of privacy violations. “Don’t send your boyfriend a naked photo, or post on Facebook about how drunk you got, because you never know where that stuff might wind up,” that sort of thing. But it turns out it’s an important lesson for perpetrators to learn, too. Ravi may have thought that he could stream the video of Clementi without doing any long-term damage, but he couldn’t know what someone else might do with the images he broadcast. And he probably thought his bragging tweets wouldn’t be seen by anyone but his friends, but he was wrong about that too. Really wrong.

Acting like a jackass can ruin your life.

Even if we adopt the most charitable interpretation of each of Ravi’s actions — even if we give him the benefit of the doubt on every question, even if we put no blame on him at all for what happened to Tyler Clementi — we’re left with one unavoidable fact: Acting like a jackass completely messed up his life.

He’is facing serious criminal charges, and the threat of more than a decade in jail. He may well be sued for damages by Clementi’s family. He’s got pretty much zero chance of ever returning to Rutgers as a student. And for the rest of his life, this story will follow him around wherever he goes, whatever he does. All because he acted like a jackass for three days in the first month of his first year at college.

Seriously. Don’t be a jackass. Just don’t.

Malcolm Gladwell yesterday:

Question: Angus Johnston in the Huff. Post says you don’t understand social networks. If you had a chance to read the article, what is your take on his perspective?

Answer: I think what he means is that I don’t agree with him. Incomprehension is simply what a narcissist calls disagreement.

Malcolm Gladwell in the essay in question:

Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial matter. But it doesn’t involve financial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.

Emphases added. Hat tip to Evan Ratliff of Cazart.

“The Student Action Labor Project. Student Action Labor … notice it spells SLAP. Do you think it’s a coincidence that it’s called SLAP? ”

–Glenn Beck yesterday (at 18:30 in this video), attempting to slime the USSA-affiliated Student Labor Action Project in the run-up to this weekend’s One Nation March.

Thursday Update | New developments in this story, including a Wednesday evening protest at Rutgers, can be found in this follow-up post. Also, please read this post before commenting.

This story breaks my heart.

A Rutgers first-year reportedly committed suicide last week after his roommate used a webcam to secretly capture and broadcast video of him having “a sexual encounter” with another man in their dorm room.

The roommate, Dharun Ravi, is said to have made the video available for others to view online and then bragged about the incident on Twitter:

“Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”

Ravi posted that first tweet on a public Twitter account on September 19. On September 21 he announced that he planned to use the webcam to broadcast his roommate a second time, and invited his 148 followers to watch with him:

“Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes it’s happening again.”

(This tweet has been erroneously reported as “don’t you dare video chat me.” My text is taken from Google’s cache of the now-deleted account.)

On September 23 his roommate, who has not been publicly identified, reportedly jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge.

Ravi and his alleged accomplice Molly Wei have been charged with multiple counts of invasion of privacy, each of which carries a possible five-year prison term.

2:30 pm Update | The dead student has been identified by multiple news sources as Tyler Clementi, age 18. A representative of Clementi’s family confirms that he and Ravi were roommates at Rutgers.

2:45 Update | Early reports suggested that Ravi faced a maximum five-year prison term, but the Newark Star-Ledger now reports, he could be sentenced to as much as thirteen years behind bars if convicted on all the charges that have so far been brought against him..

3:00 Update | I’ve written before about my own small attempt to fight anti-gay violence and bullying, and about Dan Savage’s far more ambitious It Gets Better Project.

9:00 Update | Tyler Clementi’s family has released a statement:

“Tyler was a fine young man, and a distinguished musician. The family is heartbroken beyond words. They respectfully request that they be given time to grieve their great loss and that their privacy at this painful time be respected by all. The family and their representatives are cooperating fully with the ongoing criminal investigations of two Rutgers University students.”