Breakage, I did wonder about that before posting, but as a matter of fact the gambling industry are under huge pressure right now in political terms, because they make a lot (Ladbrokes I think almost half; the rest at least a quarter and usually more) of their profits from incredibly addictive gaming machines. Senior management's pay in a main competitor is now being linked to how well they can demonstrate an ability to present the company as concerned by problem gambling, and social responsibility more generally, and I really doubt that this concern is isolated to that one company. They're all very jittery about the potential fallout if there is a lot of focus on the effect their shop expansions (and they're expanding like mad, because those machines are so addictive) are having on the local communities. If the machines are regulated, let alone banned, profits will fall sharply and closures will ensue. It's a very, very bad time for people to be contacting their MPs or ministers (and the petition is intended for them) with a complaint that a major betting company are doing something extremely socially irresponsible.
I'm sure they meant to shock, because their core target for new market will be very young men, so they want to be seen as pushing the boundaries with that target market. What they won't want is a focus on how generally socially corrosive they are. And the petition is aiming squarely at the people who have regulatory powers, at a time when consideration is being given to an inquiry into their social effect. I doubt senior management will want that, just as I doubt senior management sign off on every single poster campaign - they'll run numerous over the year. For what it's worth, the friend who linked to the petition on her Facebook actually works in Parliament and sees various campaigns across her desk every day of the week. She thought it was well targeted, given the current anxieties in the industry.
And no, of course natural human curiosity doesn't make you a bad person. In fact interest in other people is IMO what makes someone a good person, and at its lowest denominator, gossip will be how that's expressed. But being interested in the outcome of a trial centred on a horrible human tragedy is very different from a stylised marketing campaign which turns it explicitly into light entertainment (the Oscars reference) mocks disability (haw, haw, he can't "walk") and is blithely oblivious to the fact that either this man accidentally shot dead someone he loved because he was terrified, in a nation with colossal murder rates, of an intruder... or he deliberately murdered his own girlfriend, in a domestic violence scenario. That's not a soap opera or a movie, it's a real event.
A real person has died in terrible cicumstances, and it's being treated as nothing more than a joke, and an opportunity to make money. That is rather more seriously nasty than the "chav" jokes previously mentioned. In fact it's downright sociopathic.