[colinb]

I cannot read the article so I'm possibly talking out of line, but still, do you have evidence to back this up? All of my anecdata of the ~20ish autistic people that I know is that they fully understand basic horribleness.

I read that autistic people might have trouble reading the moods of others, not that they don't actually give a fuck.

[jwandborg]

You can learn about feelings, but that means you misunderstand or is completely ignorant of the mechanics of the feeling until you are taught about it, once you're taught about it you can try to interpret the signs, but it's still hard and error-prone work, even though it's probably work worth doing, for the benefit of other's perception of your actions.

There are feelings and mechanics I wish I'd learned earlier.

[orbifold]

So do people with autism automatically have some form of anti-social personality disorder? If someone doesn't have empathy or can understand how they are hurting others that should be cause for a lot of concern.

[kube-system]

The article describes that he liked to recite the lines of movie super villains, and was fascinated with internet trolls because they were popular. And he wanted to be popular.

And how now he repeatedly writes letters to the judge and warden asking to be let out, and in calls with family he doesn’t understand why he’s still there.

[Scandiravian]

Autism is a spectrum disorder. There are many who can live high functioning lives, there are also those who never learn to speak and require assistance there entire life.

I'm guessing most of the people you've met are high functioning, so there's a bias in what your understanding of autism is

In more severe forms of autism a combination of learning disabilities and the inability to read facial expressions can make it hard to parse what is considered "horrible" for the people suffering from the condition

That does not mean they lack empathy or desires harm in others. The issue is that they need help and support parsing the environment around them

Of cause some might need to be denied access to certain things like knives or social media because their inability to understand could be a danger to their surroundings, but that's a situation for a minority of people with autism