Ricky blames celebs for hacking scandal

Comedian Ricky Gervais's response to the leaked nude celebrity pictures.

Comedian Ricky Gervais's response to the leaked nude celebrity pictures.

Published Sep 2, 2014

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Johannesburg - Never one to suffer fools gladly, Ricky Gervais has waded into the celebrity nude pic hacking saga with a bit of sage advice: don’t put nude pics of yourself on your computer.

The British comedian told his nearly 6-million Twitter followers: “Celebrities, make it harder for hackers to get nude pics of you from your computer by not putting nude pics of yourself on the computer.”

However, some Twitter users didn’t take kindly to Gervais’ advice, forcing him to delete the tweet and post something more conciliatory.

“Of course the hackers are 100 per cent to blame but you can still makes jokes about it. Jokes don't portray your true serious feelings on a subject,” he wrote.

“It's more important to spend your energy trying to stop actual bad things than to run around trying to stop jokes about bad things.”

Later on, he added: “Offence is the collateral damage of free speech”.

As the backlash continued, Gervais posted a pic of himself in the bath, with this caption: “Anyone who retweets this leaked erotic photo of me should be ashamed of themselves”.

He even called on the help of controversial evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who recently caused a public outcry after tweeting that it was immoral for mothers to continue with their pregnancy when they knew their foetus had Down Syndrome.

“I hope Richard Dawkins tweets something soon,” wrote Gervais. “He's a bigger idiot magnet than me and it will give me time to slip out the back way. Haha.” - Tonight Reporter

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