Reading the list of "receipts" in the "wrongfully accused" link is heart-breaking. I can't imagine having to dig through my personal correspondence to submit to the court of public opinion, "see?! I wasn't a creep!"
The best solution here is to completely disconnect from social media or (at most) have an incredibly sanitized presence. Unless your job or livelihood revolves around needing to engage with a random internet audience (i.e. you're an influencer, entertainer, etc.) stay away from having a public persona on Twitter/Facebook/etc.
The only community I interact with candidly tends to be this one. I don't post on Twitter, Facebook, etc. because the vast majority of mainstream social media users (a) don't tend to have good-faith debates on any intellectually-interesting topics, and (b) will always find something to rip out of context and crucify you.
But this is easier said than done. Dopamine's a helluva' drug.
Social media is pure poison that exploits every frailty of human nature. And it is optimized to be this way, even if unintentionally, because that's what makes money.
To me it shows humans simply cannot (yet?) deal with such wide-reaching communication. It's fine in neatly organised and moderated forums. But those still have some sense of privacy, similar to how people at a workplace can freely talk about things that wouldn't be fine to say on live TV.
But social media turns everything into live TV, potentially analysed with more rigor than any TV show ever witnessed, and with algorithms implicitly optimised to make the things most visible which generate the most powerful emotions. And it doesn't seem like the social media concept is going to disappear soon, it's just part of everyday life for many.
I don't see how that would have helped OP. He wasn't called out for things he said or did on social media, barring a few people who piled on over extremely "sanitized" exchanges.
I think your "best solution" aligns well with what the OP appeared to be doing, and he still burned.
It's important to note that just because the mob forms on social media doesn't mean its consequences are limited to social media.
> I think your "best solution" aligns well with what the OP appeared to be doing, and he still burned.
OP has a huge Twitter presence (600k+ followers), and I guess my point is when you have that kind of presence you open yourself up to being a "pseudo-public" person. Sometimes, you need to do this (if you're a politician, for example). But usually you don't.
People will get more riled up when the person they're crucifying is famous - clout-chasing is a real thing. Although you (sadly) sometimes have exceptions to this rule, so you're right that it's not a complete solution.
Not at all. I had more than that before I quit twitter and I am about as minor a figure in a sub-sub-sub-industry as one can be; actually-famous people have millions. Not-quite-famous people have hundreds of thousands.
Not really. If you put a classified ad in a Chicago paper saying you were having a garage sale, you were exposed to a million people and had the direct attention of the many thousands who would actually read the ad. If you spent an hour putting up flyers at major intersections near the bar you were playing at on Thursday night, thousands of people per hour would see them.
It's important to remember that there are as many people following 10K people as are being followed by 10K people. They aren't really paying attention to 10K people's photos of their lunches or stray observations on Ohio sports.
No one actually has the reach of their entire follower count. If there was a way to analyze your own followers to root out Bots and inactive people, who knows how much lower the number would be. That isn’t counting active users who don’t pay attention to you. And even if they pay attention to you, it might be in a non caring way. Outside of 16K being a big number. That number alone doesn’t mean much when it comes to modern social media.
A good easy contrast is the “phenom” of how flighty, not loyal, and weaker of a connection TikTok followers are. I believe it is very hard to go from being big on Tiktok to elsewhere. Contrasted by other social media.
Also. This is all coming from some one who has never had more than 200 of so followers on any social media.
To add on top of that. It’s really the accusers’ following that is important. The target may not even have a social media profile as long as they have some online identity to point to.
> vast majority of mainstream social media users (a) don't tend to have good-faith debates
This. Thank you. I have unconsciously wondered into such debates on social media cesspools, and approaching it like I do with HN, which is atleast more logical
I think a key reason is HN has (IMO) a well-designed vote-based moderation system. Flamebait tends to get downvoted/flagged pretty quickly, burying it where it belongs.
Contrast that to pure engagement-focused social networks like Facebook or Twitter, which do the opposite: prioritize showing flamebait, because people are engaging with it and therefore it must necessarily be quality content!
Agree. Reddit has a unique ability among large social networks to bring up sanity and good discussion. If there is misinformation being being spread I'd expect information disputing it to be in the comments 90%+ of the time. (Except for the niche subreddits as you mentioned)
HN does not have out-of-control mobs and flamewars because HN has dedicated human moderators who monitor hot conversations and use a variety of tools to de-escalate them.
Voting manages the day-to-day and gives them signal to work with, but ultimately open communities (i.e. that anyone can join) need active moderation to remain stable over the long term.
Having a following on social media has great benefits for regular techies, not just influencers and entertainers, etc. It lets you magnify your resume to reach people with authority who you normally couldn't connect with. It helps you get spots at conferences, seats on cool new projects or positions that you can further leverage to increase your online fame and bump up your compensation. You can also use your following to get preferential treatment with companies and authorities, have your problems solved faster. Got your app removed from the Play Store with no explanation? Raise a stink on Twitter.
That's one of the reasons why people are so quick to join the fray and throw a punch. They want to be that one quick Tweet that goes viral, gets them thousands of followers and builds their brand.
You can certainly be both an "influencer" and a "techie" but what you describe is someone participating in the "influencer" side of things and no longer being just a "regular" techie.
There are a lot of benefits of being an influencer, but it has its downsides too.
As a regular techie with a 16,000 person following you are not getting any of those perks. Your app will die. You may feel like you are raising a stink but a phone call would work better. Recruitors finding you on twitter is possible, submitting your resume ensures they have it is a better strategy. Making conference organizer friends on twitter or in person can get great conference speaker spots but not something the average developer does.
I get my dopamine from Instagram. But I'm on Facebook because it is a unique source of connections and information and the anti-social media crowd seems unwilling to acknowledge this. I certainly understand if some people don't see Facebook that way. Maybe they don't have a need for certain niche communities or they don't care about keeping in loose touch with far flung friends and family. But I have found tremendous value in those things. That's fine if you don't, but at least acknowledge that many people do and simply saying "quit Facebook" doesn't help those people. And the problems persist.
I think rejection from society at large is a fundamental human problem. We went from literal witch hunts to figurative ones, but the concept and human psychology has more or less always been the same.
The graph of meaningful human relationships is always going to be small and consist only of bidirectional edges. It's a road to accepting that and forging self-worth based on the people you know and care about, and who know and care about you, not the people who will never know you let alone care about you.
Adults are, generally, prejudiced, biased and unfair. Most people will have no problem with favouring their friends, but vehemently accuse others of favouritism, nepotism, etc. By nature, we are suspicious of strangers, and rightly so, but it's also holding us back in everything.
It takes active role models, introspection and life-long seeking of enlightened approaches, to break the mold. Few do, but when one do, many can follow.
No kidding. Getting off facebook was game changing. I also just started blocking everyone strong on the outrage / offense scale (I used to be friends with a pretty broad section from right to left though I'm left). But everyone just lost their minds.
HN is one of the better places by far, and I think it takes active action by someone at the top to hold the line.
On here we also get extreme reactions still though - The only reason apple does X is because they are evil and want to spy on you etc.
One idea you see in nature and also developing countries is camouflage. You basically give your kids a very generic name so they blend in, harder to search etc. In developing countries people really operate with nicknames a lot more and sometimes have multiple "real" names.
One of the things that IMO helps HN a lot is that it de-prioritizes politics (at least hotly debated topics,) in part due to the rules, and in part simply due to having something else to talk about.
I don't think politics in general as a topic should be banned, but there is exactly zero intellectual gratification in reading a thread where I can predict without reading what the opposing sides are going to say and the respective counter-arguments.
I just can't see how thread #32768 about affirmative action or thread #65537 about abortion can be more interesting than the previous one. You'll just be served defrosted opinions.
Yeah I cut Facebook out of my life and went cold turkey after realizing it was not healthy place and now find it actively repellent to be on it. The only reason i haven't closed my account entirely is because Messenger and my D&D group uses it for scheduling. even that I use the web site and refuse to allow it a foothold on my phone.
Hey, since we're on the topic of better social networking, I wonder if a side project I've been working on for the past few months might be of interest to you. The website, Reason, is an app for helping people connect with others with similar interests through group chats. It's kind of like Meetups, but online and designed for people who would like to find semi-regular groups of friends and acquaintances to chat about some specific topic.
+1. I did exactly this a few years back when I saw a prominent member of the Nodejs community get savaged for linking to an article (exploring the idea that campus speech codes might adversely impact autistic people). I thought "if they can (nearly) take down this guy (a Nodejs technical steering committee member) for linking to a blog post, what are they going to do to me, Joe Nobody?" I was primarily a consultant at the time and relied on being invited to conferences to give talks & trainings in order to drum up new consulting work. Reputational damage would have been devastating to my income as a freelancer.
So participating "in the public sphere" was just not worth the risk. I had no idea what view I express today might in the future be deemed unacceptable. Even just being visible on there makes you more of a target–it's harder to have a pile-on on, say, someone's blog.
I miss twitter and facebook at times (quit facebook for different reasons), but overall it's a huge relief to not be contributing to those ecosystems.
Yeah I stopped consulting and for a full time gig around the time I quit Twitter. You’re right I really couldn’t afford to quit while I was consulting, at least it seemed unwise at the time.
You're assuming that internet mobs only attack based on misconstrued online content, but that's far from true.
I think the best solution here is to speak up on behalf of those who are unfairly attacked, in spite of the negative fallout from getting involved. The worst thing that can happen in cases like this is when nobody supports the victim. That can be profoundly traumatizing.
> I think the best solution here is to speak up on behalf of those who are unfairly attacked
The reality is that there is no easy way forward, no simple answer:
You don't know the truth any better than the mindless mob. If someone is accused of sexual assault or harassment, do you want to risk defending them, only to find out later that you guessed wrong? When the video comes out showing the crime, do you want your name permanently associated with trying to protect them?
The witch hunt / lynching / mob attack is always the wrong act, regardless of what someone has done. Perhaps the best you can do is to point that out, but that is also difficult. People will not read the nuance and assume you are on the other side. And you only have so much social capital - when everyone blocks you after the first time you stand up, what do you do after that?
> The best solution here is to completely disconnect from social media
I've thought about that, but your reputation is being destroyed. You'll offer no defense? You'll let everyone who you value get that impression of you? You'll allow it to become permanent, public record for anyone who ever looks you up with a search engine?
People are going to believe what they want to believe regardless of information presented disputing. You can expend energy and effort and get frustrated by not changing anyone's mind, or not and have the same result. ???
I think he’s saying you should disconnect before any of that happens.
There is no defense against the barrage of a Twitter mob, doesn’t matter how hard you try. It also seems that the better the reputation you have, the more difficult it is to recover.
If you are not part of the platform it can’t hurt you. I’m not on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, any of these services, so the mobs can’t really get to me. They could be flaming me there right now and I’d have no idea and it wouldn’t bother me at all! Excising social media altogether pretty much removes this vector of harassment.
> If you are not part of the platform it can’t hurt you. I’m not on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, any of these services, so the mobs can’t really get to me. They could be flaming me there right now and I’d have no idea and it wouldn’t bother me at all! Excising social media altogether pretty much removes this vector of harassment.
What if the people you know are reading it, and it affects your friendships, your job, your business partners, your reptuation?
This is why your identity online should never be traceable back to your real name. It's a pretty scorched-earth opinion on privacy, but the internet ultimately doesn't change if you use an alias. If you do so, employers will come back empty-handed when they try Googling you, and they'll have a harder time finding "that dumb Twitter post" that jeopardizes your job.
None of this is to say that you should be a bad person online, or otherwise take advantage of anonymity. Being anonymous just gives you a healthy personal shield, and the option to "cash out" and walk away from that identity, if you so desire.
> None of this is to say that you should be a bad person online, or otherwise take advantage of anonymity. Being anonymous just gives you a healthy personal shield, and the option to "cash out" and walk away from that identity, if you so desire.
I wouldn't call it anonymity. You can read all of the posts I've made on hacker news by going through my posts (although I can't really prove that to you). My identity just isn't linked to who I am IRL, and both aren't linked to my twitter, and the three aren't linked to my discord. That means that I can be appreciated and judged as an indivudal on HN, but it won't have consequences on other platforms. On the other hand, if I make a really really popular twitter post I can't profit from it here. As you said, it's of course not a reason or way to be a bad person. I just think it's important for me to separate my different identities.
But in an increasingly default-online world, "employers come back empty-handed" looks suspicious and can get you passed over for candidates with robust LinkedIn profiles. And keeping oneself pseudonymous doesn't help at all if someone with an issue goes after you publicly online and the only search result for your name becomes someone else's side of the story.
I agree it's not realistic. The backwards arrow, however (i.e. you can get the real name from the handle easily, but you can't get the handle from the real name, or at least not easily) isn't hard to achieve and affords most of the protection.
If you're not going to be awful online, nobody will try to figure out who you are from a pseudonymous handle. But your employer/potential employer will certainly google your name.
"big dongle hehe" is not something that should have any sort of meaningful consequences. That's not normal and it bothers me that you consider it normal to lose a job over it.
This is sometimes easier said than done. I've always tried to keep my social media presence far away from my real name, but a few years back I went to a job interview and one of the first questions they asked me was about my Twitch channel.
I didn't have any major following, it's mostly just a couple of friends and I will start a stream so my buddies can watch and we can chat about the game. We had been doing that for an hour or so before my interview just to calm my nerves a bit and kill time. My interviewers were watching that stream.
Anyways, it was pretty shocking to have the interviewer just straight up admit they dug me up, in detail. I felt pretty invaded. To their credit (or perhaps mine) they didn't feel any of my online activity was troubling. I did the interview, was offered the job and turned it down even though I was unemployed and pretty broke. I didn't feel comfortable working for them.
To this day I don't really know how they dug me up. I tried it afterwards myself and I couldn't. As a result I dialed my online presence back quite a bit. I am semi-active here but almost nowhere else. I don't really stream anymore.
I like your thinking, given that people are a very common attack vector.
I don't remember for certain, it was a few years ago. It's unlikely though. I don't give references by default and I am almost never asked for them. I don't recall if they asked for them, but I don't think so.
Also the overlap of people who I share my online activity with and people I would use as professional references is extremely small. Maybe literally one person.
It is probably something very small like accidentally linking an email address to an account I shouldn't have.
It’s a tradeoff. Adopting an abstract featureless identity for your Internet interactions can greatly limit your ability to cultivate relationships online, especially when it comes to producing and self-promoting your work/art
I would go even further and create multiple identities based on what you comment on. I for example use one alias for tech-related stuff where I also expose my job (but not my identity). I use another for all politics related stuff that could get me in hot water. It's also a nice effect that I can you switch accounts and turn off politics.
I found this compelling as a response to the idea of cancel culture.
It's kind of interesting, but I think if anybody wanted to cancel me, they'd have a hard time. I have almost no twitter/facebook presence, no linkedin at all, most of my close friends and family don't give a shit about what a bunch of Twitter randos think, and I work at a small enough company that I'd probably get my case heard.
I realize that some of that is luck and not just "positioning" but why give yourself a larger attack surface than you need to at a time when one wrong comment from 20 years ago can end you?
The issue is, as OP demonstrated, that this has nothing to do with your interaction with social media.
Social media was the connective tissue that gave rise to the internet mob, but neither the OPs behavior on social media, nor his response on social media, had any impact on the outcomes. Nor were the outcomes limited to affecting his social media presence. As per the original article, OP got nailed for comments from a twitter account he didn't run, and whose true owner publicly confessed to owning it.
That is, just because you walk away from social media doesn't mean that social media has walked away from you.
Which makes me think: who are these people with enough time of their hands to be morality warriors on internet? Also who are these _friends_ who jumps on conclusion without allowing for a defense? I shouldn't be difficult, in this digitalized world, to provide solid proof of wrongdoing.
I may not be the most aware of social cues, or maybe it's a cultural thing, but some of these people seems like absolute sociopaths.
> Also who are these _friends_ who jumps on conclusion without allowing for a defense?
I wonder if this person is referring more to their social group. I get the impression that there are groups of "friends" that are really more of a social group and are all walking on eggshells around one another re orthodoxy and and at the same time poised to jump on anyone who is perceived to do something against their group values.
Sort of like the situation in 1984, Winston, Syme, Ampleforth, Parson, are all "friends" in some sense but effectively would denounce each other immediately for anything and feel the need to insert little "there is a war going on of course" type platitudes in conversation.
> Which makes me think: who are these people with enough time of their hands to be morality warriors on internet?
Maybe young people? I know that when I was younger (around high school) and more active on twitter, I supported everything progressive because I thought it was the right thing to do, without looking too much into the facts. Fortunately I never had a bigger reach than a few dozen of people with the same ideas as me, and never directly attacked people or insulted them or anything, but I wonder if it's because of virtue or just that I'm more shy than most people.
I'm glad I grew up and don't do this kind of thing anymore, but I can't say I don't understand why people would do this. Maybe education about this would help? But on the other hand voices that says "there are two sides to every stories" often get drowned in righteous fury, and I'm not sure I would have listened to them.
The problem is previously we didn't listen to victims, and allowed them to be silenced. Now the pendulum has swung the other way, and we are listening unconditionally, but (occasionally) bad actors are taking advantage of our good intentions. How do we find balance?
This is essentially why civilization has legal systems and courts. Unfortunately, legal systems and courts don't scale to internet (global) scale. You'll be "dead," metaphorically speaking, of an internet mob attack before your lawyer even calls you back.
We drastically need significant reform of our court system. We simply don't have the capacity to address the current demanda on the court system (which is why we need ao many plea deals.) We certainly don't have the slack we need in the system to be able to drastically expand the scope.
The very same people that are complaining about cancel culture will without a shred of irony start to complain about moderator censorship.
I've touched on this in another comment, in another thread - if we are going to assume that people have the right to say whatever the hell they want, how do you reconcile that with the rights of a mob to pigpile someone for speaking their mind?
The short answer is: "You can't."
The long answer is: "You can't, because when two groups are in such a conflict, you either explicitly censor one, or implicitly censor the other."
Please don't make assumptions about what people believe like you are doing here. It limits your ability to engage in any sort of meaningful discussion and encourages more of the pointless partisan bickering that is causing such great harm to our country.
You can make the same sort of point without such language. Rather than asserting that "everyone who beleives X also believes Y and that is contradictory", you should assert "believing X and Y together is contradictory".
The issue isn't bad actors taking advantage and the issue isn't listening to victims. We should absolutely keep listening unconditionally and there will always be bad actors.
The problem is how we respond to what we hear. The core casue of the issue is treating online vigilante outrage mobs as an acceptable activity.
This is absolutely not true. You are so far from correct that you do not seem to be operating in good faith. If you are operating in good faith, please go do some basic research.
I think there's another layer here with the virtue signalling side of it, and that depends on the exact communities/movements that a person is a part of. Like, where is the cancellation of Marjorie Taylor Greene over the absurd Holocaust comments? Matt Gaetz claims to be "cancelled" but could appear on multiple prime time cable news shows basically whenever he wants [1]. It was a huge battle getting Bill O'Reilly off the air, and he walked with a $32M severance, more money than most normal people see in a lifetime— see the movie Bombshell for a dramatization of that story. These people aren't cancellable because they're already powerful, protected, and the audience they have doesn't care about the complaints (or revels in them).
Maybe it's something of a reaction to these frustrations that some progressive circles have adopted this knee-jerk zero tolerance stance, where no crime or perceived crime is too small to attempt to silence someone for. YouTube film commentator Lindsay Ellis went through a bunch of this recently, and basically dealt with it by making a 1.5 hour video where she itemizes everything she's been accused of, and drinks her way through explaining and apologizing for all of it (including, wretchedly, sharing about her own history with a sexual assault). [2]
In this case the accusation is that the accused used completely anonymous means to harass the accuser. How the accuser knows that the accused is responsible is not stated.
If/when any of my friends get attacked by the mob, I hope I'll have the courage to stand by them publicly. A good recent test was the doxing of Scott Alexander. I signed the open letter against it with my real name and was happily surprised to see the names of many people I know. We should have more of these small but visible acts of resistance that let like-minded people find you.
The Scott Alexander controversy isn't analogous at all. That was entirely due to his public writing, not alleged private interactions between him and others.
The post, and your comment, IMO wrongly frames this as courage .vs. cowardice in standing up for friends.
However, that fails to take into account any context of the particular “cancellation”.
eg, A situation with damning screenshots of lewd DMs are pretty ‘smoking gun’, and the barometer of “good friends would publicly support me” feels like an insane expectation when (in this hypothetical instance) the person did a bad thing.
Perhaps being cancelled isn’t the solution (because we’re all flawed) but the automatic expectation of character references come a scandal isn’t fair on one’s friends.
My view is more like "a true friend would help you hide a body", or the short story "Friends in San Rosario" by O.Henry. If I abandoned a friend to the mob due to "screenshots of lewd DMs", I'd have a hard time living with myself afterward.
That doesn’t feel like a worldview that would result in a fairer society or better personal conduct.
If defending a person, in the face of prima facie evidence, has the result of preserving their reputation and status (and keeping the reputation and status of the accuser in their original state) then it doesn’t feel useful or good.
I have a little kid. When we watch cartoons, they might point at the villain of the piece - e.g., Jafar - and say "he's a bad man!"
And I take the opportunity to nudge them and ask, "They did a bad thing. Does that mean they're always bad? Can they make things better? Should we forgive them? How do we know when to forgive them?" (not in a single tirade; these are just questions I drop over time.)
Because, in anticipation of the fact that they're definitely going to fuck up along the way, I want them to learn that mistakes and failures and even doing bad things don't make them irrevocably bad - that ultimately, the most important thing is making amends / trying again / etc. That your worst decision is not the sum total of who you are.
I don't see why I should try so hard to teach that to my kid, and then "disavow" friends who may have fucked up.
It's in the nature of friendships to not be fair or good for the whole society. We regularly favor our friends over strangers for all sorts of things. If you want fair, don't favor your friends. The trouble is, that also means probably not having any friends. There's a personal price to pay for being "good".
Just a heads up for any friends of mine reading this comment, if you kill someone, I'm not gonna help cover it up. Probably even if you were justified — you'll still have to take your chances with the court system. Good luck tho!
That kind of scenario doesn’t seem relevant, given the kind of attacks this thread is about, but if shown a damning screenshot, I would hope that I would not not immediately disavow a friend before looking into it, and if the situation was indeed that bad, would still love my friend enough to help them rehabilitate and obtain forgiveness from the people they wronged. I believe it’s possible to temporarily withdraw good graces to that end without permanently disavowing someone.
This is a good and much more balanced/nuanced outlook.
However (in my hypothetical scenario which was meant to challenge the utility of blanket statements of support), a message of support does effectively act as a counterweight to an accusation, and unless one possesses all of the facts it may have the effect of laundering the reputation of somebody who deserves criticism (though I’d argue that in most instances, cancellation is very very over the top as a penalty).
I think that a culture of lovingly challenging our friends is part of the solution to that problem of that counterweighting. I should be the first to uncover the sins, if you will, of my friend, and urge repentance and restitution, temporarily withholding approval to achieve that end, and involving more people in that knowledge to the degree necessary with public shaming being a last resort. (In this example, the problem is not one requiring legal intervention.)
Sadly, the idea that a friend can be a loyal one, while insisting on good behavior, seems alien today.
> I think that a culture of lovingly challenging our friends is part of the solution to that problem of that counterweighting. I should be the first to uncover the sins, if you will, of my friend, and urge repentance and restitution, temporarily withholding approval to achieve that end, and involving more people in that knowledge to the degree necessary with public shaming being a last resort. (In this example, the problem is not one requiring legal intervention.)
Yep. :) I tried to generalize the philosophy but apparently didn’t cover my tracks well enough. I’d like to think that the principles would work for anyone.
They definitely don't. These things are easily manipulated and abused. Leaving the church was one of the best things I ever did, but now the moralistic tone makes sense. Thanks for your honesty.
Righteousness generally lends us to believing those things. I think my memories of it were that it was more harmful than good, though there was surely some benefit.
I think I know what you mean by the words righteous and moralistic. I’d definitely say I’m optimistic about these ideas, and obviously pessimistic about how rare they’re applied in the wild as I said a few comments ago. The criticism you’ve given me is exactly the kind of challenge and accountability I’m asking for, though, even though we aren’t in the same group aside from HN, so thank you!
I think an interesting question is: can you support people and wish the best for them even if they've done a bad thing?
With the exception of some particularly abhorrent things, I'm not sure I'd consider myself a friend to someone if I'm not willing to support them even if they're in the wrong. That doesn't mean lying for them or trying to pretend it wasn't bad, but I would expect myself to push back on mischaracterizations of them (positive or negative!) and help them navigate the consequences.
I’d like to think I could but it’s largely context and “acknowledgement + repentance dependent” on the part of the ‘accused’ (if they did do the bad thing).
That is, I am not going to defend somebody who won’t even be honest and open about their wrongdoing.
> I would expect myself to push back on mischaracterizations of them (positive or negative!) and help them navigate the consequences.
The thing is, what tell you it's actually mischaracterizations. You can believe me, I'm not the same in front of my parents, versus in front of my boss or in front of my friends. I'm not saying I'm doing anything bad, but there's trait that I'll show more or less depending on the involved party.
It can also pretty easily change between public and private settings, I don't have much situation for which it happens for me, except obviously my SO, but I have known people that does adapt to my more relax personality when they are alone with me. Nothing nefarious in my case, but a good example on how in private someone may act differently based on the other party.
So sure I agree that you may support them, tell your own story about that person, but you still need to understands that it's only your story, that has nothing to do with anyone else story.
You’re right. It was a bad, rushed example on my part.
I was effectively trying to say “Imagine a scenario where the wrongdoing was basically certain”, for the purposes of focusing on the ‘backing up friends with a public statement’ part of the situation.
I know that in reality this (probability of guilt) can’t readily be uncoupled from the result (the statement) but I asked people to imagine a situation of certain ‘guilt’.
Speaking of Scott Alexander, this kind of thinking seems exactly like the kind of virtue signaling he writes about in "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup". As the priest in the parable says:
>It seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don’t really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don’t regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. You forgive a conventional duel just as you forgive a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn’t anything to be forgiven.
And as Scott continues:
>Actual forgiveness, the kind the priest needs to cultivate to forgive evildoers, is really really hard. The fake forgiveness the townspeople use to forgive the people they like is really easy, so they get to boast not only of their forgiving nature, but of how much nicer they are than those mean old priests who find forgiveness difficult and want penance along with it.
I think about this a lot when I see the perennial discourse on canceling. Scott talks about this argument in terms of people being canceled by leftists, but I think it applies almost as well to people on the opposite side handwringing about cancellation. There are lots of great points to be made about the corrosive effects of cancellation mob rule, but I sometimes wonder if most of the left-right difference on this issue comes down to how strongly they feel about the infraction in question, rather than any level-headed consideration of what policy would lead to the best society.
> most of the left-right difference on this issue comes down to how strongly they feel about the infraction in question
I would say this is pretty clearly the case. Most of the time the question seems to be "is this cancel-worthy": the difference in your reaction to the "cancellation" of, say, J.K. Rowling vs. Nikole Hannah-Jones probably depends more on your feeling about what they've done than on your stance on "cancellation" itself.
This happened to a friend of mine recently. Some woman posted their conversation to an instagram story, saying all my friend wanted was sex and implying that people should stay away from him. It seemed like she thought she was doing something courageous, when in reality she's kind of a monster. The dude did nothing more than unfollow her on insta after she strongly hinted that there would be no possibility for romance after he invited her to hangout. Instead of just getting rejected for a pretty standard way to meet people, he gets shamed in front of potentially hundreds of people. So much for ostensibly sex friendly liberalism. Screenshots of DMs are hardly smoking gun evidence of anything if your audience is heavily inclined to pile on, nor does it matter because that's a shit way to communicate anyway and removes from someone any kind of recourse. I couldn't have done anything because she had a private account, but I couldn't have done anything to counter it anyway because it was just an outlet form of social media.
My point is that nobody did a bad thing until someone actually did a bad thing, and I think that's most people's gripe with 'cancellation'.
One issue is that your friend would often not want your public support. You throwing yourself onto the pyre will not rescue them, only destroy you too. In many cases it would be symbolic-- and really just another example of virtue signaling, just like the mob but signaling a different set of virtues to a different audience.
Better that you stay employable so you can lend a financial hand if they aren't and protect your psychological health so you can be there for them in other ways.
So sure, pray for the courage to throw yourself physically in front of an unstoppable train... but also pray for the wisdom to know better. :)
I know of two people that went through the whole social media mob thing. The most hurtful thing to them was the lack of friends actually standing up for them. They felt completely alone. And with nobody taking their side, it feeds the narrative that they really are as bad as everyone claims. So no, I think you're completely wrong and what you are suggesting is cowardly.
I hope you'd ask them first. I see a lot of "cancellations" where the person at the center has already admitted fault and apologized while flying monkeys are swirling around screaming about censorship and mob justice, not realizing they're the mob and nobody asked for their help. They end up looking like idiots and make things worse.
I see this trending on TikTok with the 'Karen' thing but often you have no idea what was actually said or done, just a mob. I honestly think the Social Media Gods need to move beyond these memes because it's more witch-hunt than anything at this point.
My wife was called a “Karen” for telling a (white British) man that his big dogs were not allowed off leash at the children’s playground. It’s gotten beyond absurd at this point.
> So what are we supposed to do in a world that’s gone mad? Our symbiotic relationship with the internet has imprinted its glitches into our minds. The internet is a collective consciousness, and its mental health remains unchecked as it accelerates beyond our control. Somewhere along the way, it feels like we left compassion behind.
I can understand why someone feeling the judgement of a mob would think this but it's clearly just a simplification of what's really going on. Each person in that mob is an individual with their own beliefs, thought process, context and so on. What can feel like an avalanche of hate may simply be many individual instances of misunderstanding or confusion. To believe the people who are against you are not individuals but a single angry entity is going to make it harder deal with psychologically and harder to come up with any possible remedy.
I don't really know what the remedy would be but I would guess that it would involve a process of divide-and-conquer while addressing each individual's specific concerns.
Happened to a friend of mine during college, before FB and Twitter. He was accused of stalking, was arrested and kicked out of school. He sued to clear his name and was reinstated at school. The lawsuit did cause the accuser and the school to issue formal apologies - but that didn't undo the damage to his reputation.
There are a lot of talks on HN about the toxicity of social media. And people are pretty angry against Google and Facebook.
But to me the worse is by far Twitter. There are plenty of random people who have a disproportionate number of followers compared to the quality of their posts. And as a result can do these kind of mods. Which are amplified by retweets, something that barely exists in other social media.
Random people can have too much power. As a society we should really prevent anyone to have more than a certain reach, like for example 5k people viewing a post. If you want to have a bigger reach you should apply to get a professional account and be regulated.
This is just a conjecture, but I think the 280 character limit on Twitter (or whatever it is now) is one of the key culprits behind the trend of deteriorating discourse not just at the societal level but even at a personal level. It's simply impossible to express nuance in a 280-character span and if you can't win over an audience within that limit, they'll just scroll past whatever else you have to say. Even if you personally have a more intricate perspective on the matter, you're forced to play by majority rules if you want to reach an audience and that quickly becomes a race to the bottom in a system that rewards whoever can come up with the best one-line mic drop instead of the best formulated ideas. I've noticed in my very limited experience with Twitter that it seems to drive "engagement" from opposing sides more so than Facebook's echo chamber, which is a breeding ground for confrontation (whereas long-form Facebook rants seem more so geared towards getting people on "your side" to egg you on). In theory our society needs that sort of cross-aisle engagement to reverse the trend of political fragmentation, but if all you have is 280 characters to make your case that just simply doesn't work. I wonder if there is a solution that could make it work, but given the trend of social media culture being driven by the lowest common denominator I'm inclined to think you'd need some sort of centralized moderating authority and that just brings us back full circle to traditional media outlets
> So the common persons voice should be rate limited? Only those 'qualified' should be able to have a larger impact?
Yes, to both. To go along with what the OP was saying, the common person should have to get the attention of someone with a "professional account" in order to get their voice amplified. Of course, that's assuming "professional accounts" actually mean something and aren't handed out like blue checkmarks on Twitter.
"Random people" doesn't mean "common people". It means people with no connection to the situation, or to the people involved.
On Faceobook, the only people who can flood my notifications are people have I as friends, or maybe friends of friends. On Twitter, it's everyone, including people who are just there to be abusive.
The issue is that the people in society with the most free time seem to have the most influence on social media.
Rate limiting people so that they could only post/vote/etc once per day, for example, or perhaps amplifying the vote by the account age might work to bring more attention to more mature voices.
AFAIK Twitter already considers bots impersonating people (if not just all bots) to be against their TOS and actively works to hunt them down or remove them. The fact that they're imperfect and so your strategy might work some of the time has nothing to do with the proposition that OP is making.
Anti-Vax are also a minority, and we should block them. I guess his intentions are to make the spread slow enough so the target of harassment could respond before being piled on OR for doctors to respond to Anti-Vax claims fast enough. So maybe a reach of 1K/Day would be a better approach to slow down harassment while allowing minorities to speak up (and the compromise is that it will take more time for their voice to be heard).
WhatsApp did something similar where you cannot share a popular message to more than one, since it was used to spread a call to violence in India. [1]
Twitter is certainly the worst because of the format that drives "low quality" interaction between users. Everybody is yelling at each other, in the hope to garner a few new followers or likes. To me it's definitely the most toxic social network, far ahead of Facebook or even Reddit.
Yet driving that outrage up is what gets Twitter eyeballs thus revenue, so there is an incentive for that platform to generate this sort of behaviour. Twitter absolutely loved Trump presence, they made good money out of him.
Read this comment earlier and nodded in agreement. Somehow ended up on Twitter looking at the trending topic "people questioning need for more Ted Bundy content." Oh ha, I agree, I'm sick of serial killer true crime murder ugliness too. Click the link. Immediately see this:
"No thanks, Ted Bundy movie. If I want a story about a white guy who murders women I’ll just watch the news."
Right. White guys, they are the worst. Why is it that I can go on Twitter and within 2 minutes find hate speech attacking the group I've been assigned to? Btw, this is pretty tame. I could find worse with very little effort.
Facebook obviously gets a lot of crap but they way they default your conversations to your localized pool of contacts certainly acts like "baffles" around an online persona.
Twitter generally discourages anonymity but also has almost no protection against your content being instantly thrust into a national spotlight.
The most disturbing and insidious sentiment of online mobs is claiming that the targets are "just being held accountable". Or that such people are just experiencing "consequences". I really can't express just how cold and bloodthirsty such statements seem to be. It's the perfect combination of justifying vicious behavior while also absolving themselves of responsibility.
Well said. And notice how the refrain changed. For years it was complete denial with "cancel culture doesn't exist". Now the response is, "it's just consequence culture".
Just to be clear, is it "cancel culture" or "consequence culture" when the legal system puts people in jail, or practices capital punishment? Or are those considered something different entirely? If so, why?
The idea of a justice system in a democracy is (a) the laws are agreed upon through the political process and (b) due process and impartial consideration are applied in casting a judgment.
"Cancel culture" is primarily enforcing things that (a) have not reached the same political consensus as codified law, like laws against theft or murder, and (b) are enforced by impulse, hearsay, and mob mentality.
I guess I'm confused, there are a lot of things in life that become known by hearsay and don't reach the same consensus as codified law. What makes this special? Would it really be any different if twitter actively had daily democratic polling on who should be criticized that day? And how would that be any different from "mob mentality," if large groups of users all decided to impulsively vote the same way?
Innocent until proven guilty by a fair trial. Not the other way around.
The entire point of justice was to be less tribal. Social justice now is the opposite.
It's who has the biggest tribal cannon they can point at someone they disagree with. Not whether the facts support the claim.
So what is the solution there? Should twitter and facebook have their own internal legal system, decided upon by democratic vote as I was just describing? What would make it inherently less tribal if they did that? Would that stop large groups of people from all deciding to vote as a block and criticize one person all at once? Or is the goal something else? Surely, if this problem were theoretically solvable by a social media site, there should be some different way to operate one?
The legal system goes to great lengths to prevent it being everyone just voting who is guilty.
Democracy is not for individual cases. Jury selection throws out 95% of people because there are so many biases that make democracy terrible for this kind of analysis.
So to allow any post through, twitter should have a process that randomly selects an unbiased jury of other twitter posters, and have them judge the post before it becomes public? And that process will be administered by democratically elected representatives who ultimately decide on the 5% that doesn't get thrown out? What if you are a person who just happens to hold strong preconceived opinions about a lot of things, wouldn't you be seen as "too biased" for any jury, and get totally excluded from this process? Would that be the system being fair, or would it be another example of "cancel culture" stopping people from being jurors? I don't know, I'm just spitballing here, I'm not a legal expert or anything, but I do know that jury stacking/tampering is a real thing that happens.
I’m not sure what your point even is. Twitter should just not allow people to claim other people raped/robbed/etc without pointing to some actual conviction or ongoing trial.
No letting a pool of people decide guilt based on literally no evidence. That’s insane.
- Social media should not allow the broadcasting of unproven allegations that individuals have committed crimes, just as conventional media is barred from doing so until the cases have been heard in court.
- Utility-like services should not be allowed to refuse service to individuals without clear reason.
#1 seems practically impossible to do, considering that the definition of what a crime is tends to vary between jurisdictions. It may work if on a closed internet and social media that is segregated by jurisdiction.
#2 is already true in some cases, but as usual, the real answer is something like "it depends."
> #1 seems practically impossible to do, considering that the definition of what a crime is tends to vary between jurisdictions.
Alleging that someone has done something that happens to be a crime aren't a problem, the problem is wilfully alleging crimes outside the court system. The overwhelming majority of the posts that cause these problems either explicitly claim that someone has committed a crime, or explicitly claim that someone has committed an act that is well known to be a crime.
> #2 is already true in some cases
Not really in the US AFAICS? Certain narrowly defined groups are protected against being denied service by private businesses, but there's no broad general protection.
Yeah the thing that concerns me most about "cancel culture" (of what I see) is people openly pushing back on the principle of innocent until proven guilty. It seems to be common to argue that there is nothing wrong with the court of public opinion putting the burden of proof on the accused. Usually this is combined with some comment about how horrible the accusation is versus how supposedly mild it is to be criticized across the internet.
It's human nature to spread rumors and make snap judgements, so I'm not sure how much this can be stopped. But it scares me to see people straight up trying to morally justify it.
I mean, to me that sadly is nothing new. I've known my share of people who just assume by default that people they don't know are jerks, and are hostile toward them. I don't know what you would call it. Untrusting? I can't see where you would cross that line and all of a sudden start calling it "cancel culture" or "consequence culture" or whatever. Is it because it's happening online now?
The part that is new, or at least recently en vogue again, is how this behavior is seen as a positive. It is explicitly encouraged by current social dynamics. It is even encouraged to some extent in academic or "intellectual" circles.
Do you have any studies that actually quantify that? IMO large groups singling out and bullying individuals is not really a new thing, that has been happening for a long time.
Bullying individuals is not new. Arguing that bedrock principles of legal justice like innocent until proven guilty are quaint and antiquated in the face of the 'horrors' of the accusations (odd that they should apply to serial killers, but new modern thought-crimes are so much worse that they should not) is relatively new, especially as a mainstream position in intellectual, academic, and political circles.
That has not been my experience, do you have any studies that quantify that? From my perspective, the entire concept of legal rights and due process is what is actually the new thing, considering the total span of history anyway. These were not things that anybody had 1000 years ago, and even now some political entities still don't really have it or consider it valid (unfortunately).
As far as institutional memory is concerned, new is anything that hasn't been seen in a couple generations' lifetimes, certainly not 1000s of years. This is also why I included "recently en vogue" in my prior comment, I'm not claiming that this thought process has literally never been seen before. Just that some cultural phenomena display a back and forth pattern, with a timescale such that it will feel entirely new to the current population when it's out in full force. Further, the negative impacts of the extreme adoption are precisely what will push the pendulum back eventually.
Also I will clarify I am speaking from a US-centric perspective. Are you not in the US?
I have seen multiple academic circles seriously come to the consensus that innocent until proven guilty is not good as a general principle. This sort of thing IME occurs on mailing lists or in department meetings, and it has also ramped up considerably in just the last few years. I've never looked for literature on the topic, perhaps the institutions I am affiliated with just suck. But given the many others reporting similar sentiments I suspect there will be some literature on it as a broader phenomenon, at least in the US, down the road.
It shows that witch trials haven't gone away; they never really did. They just became more technologically savvy in their influence, both publicly and politically.
> It's the perfect combination of justifying vicious behavior while also absolving themselves of responsibility.
And Twitter/Facebook/YouTube just grin, raking in the advertising dollars from "engagement." The more people "engaged" in the activity, the better!
I don't think the concept of social media is fundamentally evil. It's dangerous, certainly, but I don't think the core concept must be evil.
Public "social media companies," driven to improve revenue from injecting advertising into streams consisting of repackaging other people's content? Those seem to reliably turn evil.
Yeah, the "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" response that some liberals give has always puzzled me. It is internally inconsistent for a liberal ideology.
1. They believe that "wage slavery" exists. That is, an employee may freely agree to employment conditions under a capitalist view, but under the liberal view, they have not freely agreed since various coercive forces exist that force them agree to the employment conditions. So if a liberal believes a "freely" agreed to job is actually not free due to coercive conditions, then a liberal should also believe that free speech is not free when coercive conditions exist that control speech.
2. The idea that any consequence of free speech is acceptable is easily countered: the consequence of you calling an insane person stupid is they kill you. Obviously no normal person would think that is acceptable. So every normal person, including those liberals with internal inconsistency in this argument, know that the argument should actually be about what consequences are warranted in response to speech.
> The idea that any consequence of free speech is acceptable is easily countered: the consequence of you calling an insane person stupid is they kill you.
"[John] Solomon is hiding because he is a coward who enjoys belittling other people from behind a safe veil of invisibility. His is like many sites on the internet, who mock and insult while lacking any courage to own their own words. In public, these cowards would not dare to say the same things, because they know full well that someone just might come after them, knock their yapping blocks off, or in a worst case scenario, go to their house one night and kill them." --Jennifer Diane Reitz, on someone who gave her webcomic a bad review.
If you're interested in learning about the values held by liberals, as one myself, I recommend you read the UN declaration of human rights https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma... as I think it does the best job at summarizing the general values held by liberals.
Now don't get fooled by what you've been told. Internet Mobs and liberals are unrelated groups, but there are politically inclined groups who are pushing an agenda to discredit liberals by association, this is a fallacy, if you want to learn more about that here's the wikipedia entry: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy
> the argument attacks a person because of the similarity between the views of someone making an argument and other proponents of the argument
So please, don't fall for this, there is no way to know what political values the people refered too in the article that were part of the mob had, lots of internet mobs are conservative, libertarian, communist, socialist, etc. just as well.
It's only a 5 min read, I recommend it, you might find you have more shared liberal values then you thought, but if you're not going too, let me point out some of the relevant ones here:
Article 12
> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
This is a liberal value. False accusations go against this, so would most of the US politcal tactics employed to smear and discriminate other parties. It's rampant in today's society, in fact you did just that, by trying to compare people who disagree with you as "idiots". You took attack on their reputation.
Article 23
> Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection
Wage slavery is a catchy attention seeking way of saying that this right is being breached by a lot of employers.
Article 19
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
This is where it gets tricky. It is your right to be allowed to tell others on social media about any information or ideas you hold. So it seem to make sense that one could tell people that their ex was abusive and a scumbag. And in turn it is fine for others to tell the ex they believe what they think of it.
But what if your ideas are an attack on someone's else honor or reputation? Are you still free to express them? Would it not then breach the other right to not have honor and reputation attacked?
Well yes, this is a dilemma. One where different people lean more on one right or the other. In the US, people lean more on the right to speech, so it tends to be free game to say whatever you want and thus internet mobs are okay.
Now what I think is that there is no real contradiction. You have the right to express yourself freely, but not to hurt someone else's reputation. So expressing lies and falsehoods to attack someone goes against that person's rights, and your right to express yourself freely is for things you believe to be truthful, or things which don't attack someone's reputation only.
That said, and I won't quote them here, other liberal values say everyone is innocent before proven guilty and have the right to a fair trial. So it would be to the person whose reputation they feel attacked to prove that the other person did in fact express lies and falsehoods to attack their reputation, and that person would need a fair trial and be treated innocent until guilty. Similarly no penal offence can be taken against someone just because there is somebody claiming they are abusive and were harassed by them, a fair trial must be held.
That leaves us with how things are exactly right now. Everyone is free to say what they want to anyone else, and everyone is free to any idea they hold of others. And for the government to interfere in any way, there'd need to be a fair trial that proves that one person's speech was a real attack on someone's reputation, and not just sharing their truths.
I don't know why you think I disagree with the idea of liberalism. I simply think if someone is a liberal, they should believe purely disagreeable speech should not have consequences; else, they are an idiot.
There are of course more complexities where speech should result in consequences, but in general, if someone says something than another otherwise unrelated person simply disagrees with, the speaker should not have their relationship with their friends, family, employer, customers, businesses they use, etc harmed. This should be enforced sometimes by law, and sometimes by culture, depending on the rights in play in the particular situation, as you outlined above.
>There are of course more complexities where speech should result in consequences, but in general, if someone says something than another otherwise unrelated person simply disagrees with, the speaker should not have their relationship with their friends, family, employer, customers, businesses they use, etc harmed.
So you do agree that freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences after all.
This is exactly what people who say that also believe. They're not supporting harassment, slander or the suppression of non-harmful political speech, nor are they claiming all consequences for speech are equally valid. Rather, simply stating that there are "complexities where speech should result in consequences."
Where the two sides actually differ (when one strips away the strawmen, trolling and bad faith arguments every iteration of this conversation generates) is what speech should be considered "purely disagreeable" (which is a purely subjective term) and what consequences are valid, which can only be determined on a case by case basis, in context.
I personally believe hateful speech should have consequences, even when it isn't explicitly and immediately threatening harm on a specific individual. An employer has the right not to associate with an employee who publicly makes bigoted statements on social media which the public has associated with the company. The public has the right to oppose such speech where it exists, and to try to convince employers to take action.
An actor or public figure whose politics I disagree with can and should be publicly criticized, and their suffering some financial harm due to the public boycotting their work is a legitimate consequence of their views.
A politician, even a sitting President of the United States, who spreads lies and misinformation can be criticized, fact-checked or even banned from social media. And yes, social media platforms should have the right to determine what can and cannot appear on their platforms, and to moderate that content beyond strict legality.
All of that is clearly within the long-established and generally agreed upon boundaries of free speech and freedom of association. None of it is a carte blanche endorsement of harassment.
We may disagree about the details, or be in violent agreement, but everyone is drawing a line in the sand somewhere.
"An actor or public figure whose politics I disagree with can and should be publicly criticized, and their suffering some financial harm due to the public boycotting their work is a legitimate consequence of their views."
So you think it's perfectly acceptable to attack an individuals livelihood because you disagree with them? The political climate in the US is split pretty evenly at the moment, so in your view we would have no actors or public figures expressing a political opinion. No matter what the opinion is there would be individuals, like yourself, who disagree with it and therefore the speaker should be cancelled. If everyone felt that way then nobody would be allowed to say anything because all expression would lead to cancellation.
This goes completely against freedom of the individual as well as freedom of speech. It is a direct slide into authoritarianism and is diametrically opposed to liberalism.
OP is correct you are not a liberal you are an authoritarian.
1. Someone loses popularity and thus their business suffers from it.
This is totally fine. I'm free not to purchase your books, music, products, services, etc. even if simply because I disagree with you on some things.
2. Someone is fired because people disagree with their ideas or thoughts.
Now this can be wrong and it can also be alright:
2.1 Someone expressed an opinion which respected other people's rights, but where a lot of people disagreed with. E.g.: I think we should invest heavily in the military to defend our borders.
In this case, this is not acceptable grounds to fire them. People have the right to hold and express their ideas freely without repercussions.
2.2 Someone expressed an opinion aimed at the destruction of other people's rights. E.g.: Black people should not be given equal treatment under the law. Women are not fit to work. White people deserve to rule over others.
In this case it is acceptable to fire them, because they attacked other people's rights, and that deserves consequences. BUT not without a fair trial. You still owe a fair trial to prove that they indeed engaged in activities aimed at the destruction of other people's rights. So in this case the person being fired should choose to sue if this happens.
Yes, I totally agree that the argument should be about "... what speech should be considered 'purely disagreeable' (which is a purely subjective term) and what consequences are valid". As I said in my very first comment, "... the argument should actually be about what consequences are warranted in response to speech".
> I personally believe hateful speech should have consequences, even when it isn't explicitly and immediately threatening harm on a specific individual
My problem with that is it makes large swaths of modern left politics uncriticizable, since any criticism of those politics will be construed as hate. Right wing politics were also once uncriticizable, in the "war on christmas" days, but that has since faded.
>My problem with that is it makes large swaths of modern left politics uncriticizable, since any criticism of those politics will be construed as hate.
Except it doesn't, because people criticize the modern left all the time, to the point that "the left" (or now the "woke left") has become a pejorative on its own. On Hacker News dunking on the left is practically a sport. And as far as hate goes, everything "the left" says, does and believes gets construed as hate as well.
But that's not a free speech issue, that's just a speech issue. Criticizing politics is criticizing people and their identity and worldview. People will inevitably take such criticism personally.
That person is being coy about the difference between Liberal and Progressive and Social Activist, perhaps because they are unaware of the meaning of "liberal" in American politics.
> I don't know why you think I disagree with the idea of liberalism
If you agree with the ideas of liberalism, by definition that would make you a liberal, but from the way you talked about "liberals", it sounded like you excluded yourself from that group, which would mean you disagree at least partly with the ideas of liberalism.
Sorry if I was wrong, you consider yourself a liberal then?
> they should believe purely disagreeable speech should not have consequences
You have the right to be disagreeable, but others have the right to hold ideas and opinions of you and tell others about them too, unless as a direct attempt to discredit you. I think the confusion here is because the word "consequence" is too vague.
If you're a disagreeable person, and no one wants to hangout with you or be your friend anymore as a result of finding you obnoxious. Well ya that's in everyone's rights, nobody is obligated to like you.
But you have rights too, the right to dignity, a livable wage, to your reputation, etc. And so this is where there can't be consequences that would breach your own rights, which are universal to all, even obnoxious disagreeable people have them, so do gays, trans, women, blacks, asian, muslims, etc.
So what you have to do is show that your rights have been violated, and now you have a case.
If you get fired for something you are accused of which is false, I'm pretty sure you do have a case and can go to court, prove it was false and thus slender, and you'll get your job back, and penal offence can be taken to the lier.
> This should be enforced sometimes by law, and sometimes by culture, depending on the rights in play in the particular situation, as you outlined above.
Now I think you're bringing another dimension. If people don't like Joe, and they get fired on ground that he's obnoxious, despicable, repulsive, make others feel unsafe, etc. Does that go against Joe's rights?
This is a tricky one. The first issue is what do we mean by disagreeable? Because that could mean that Joe is breaching other people's rights.
Article 30 > Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein
See, Joe doesn't have the right to engage in activities aimed at the destruction of any of the other rights. And this supersedes his rights as well. So he has the right to speech, but to not speak against other people's rights.
So now if by "disagreeable", we mean that Joe is actively taking part in propagating the idea that women are not fit to work and should instead be housewives. Well based on Article 30, Joe doesn't have the right to say that and he's infringing on women's rights, and so consequences can very well apply, even losing his job.
Now if by disagreeable we mean that Joe is simply someone who is always the devil advocate, or who is ackward socially, etc. Well ya then it be a pretty big violation to fire Joe purely on those grounds.
Now also, Joe doesn't have the right to "keep his job no matter what", but he has the right "to protection against unemployment", and to "economic indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality".
So in theory, it's fine to fire Joe just because he's an asshole, but he should still be given protection against unemployment and provided with ways to have economic prosperity required to keep his dignity and develop his full personality.
So you see, you cannot discriminate against other people's rights, because others have rights that protects against discrimination, but you are allowed to discriminate against someone who is actively engaging in discrimination. This is perfectly consistent. But dont get me wrong, there should still be a fair trial, you're innocent until proven guilty, an...
So how could responsibility be ensured? Make a social media site where people can't criticize each other at all? Require all posts to go through third party fact checkers?
To put it another way: If, in your opinion, twitter users are not subject to accountability based on the chaotic randomness of public opinion, then who are they being held accountable to? Who even determines what a "consequence" is in that scenario, or what the threshold for that bloodthirsty behavior is? Honest questions here, I really don't know what the solution is.
How about more employee friendly labor law so people can't get fired because of public pressure? Without teeth, this mob justice will be less of a real world problem and more contained to social media.
So what would that look like? Would employers no longer field public complaints about potential problem employees, under any circumstances? In effect, they would be required to always side with the employee in case of a dispute?
Perhaps it would exclude complaints about what they do in their job but firing someone for things they do that are unrelated to their job could be protected, like what happened in their personal relationships or what they posted on the internet if it's not part of their work.
That seems to hinge a lot on having a specific and consistent definition of what "related to the job" and "part of their work" means that won't unfairly affect some companies, maybe there is an established legal definition of that somewhere?
The legal system manages to work out vague definitions. Here's an excerpt from New Zealand's employment law regarding unjustifiable dismissal:
"The test is whether the employer’s actions, and how the employer acted, were what a fair and reasonable employer could have done in all the circumstances at the time the dismissal or action occurred."
How's that for specific and consistent! Yet it still provides protection against capricious firing.
Some US states do have laws of that type, though not all of them. In general, the answer to any kind of employer abuse is mostly the same as always: unionize.
Picture someone you really dislike, for some good reason. Now imagine you hired that person before they did whatever, or before you found out. Now you're stuck with them. Now your company is known primarily for what they did and you are losing business.
So basically the way it was with overt racist and sexist hiring before that was illegal? The solution is to suck it up and let the other employees who are too bigoted to cope quit.
It would look like France, Japan, or, y'know, most industrialised countries. Employers would be required to give cause for any firing, and follow a documented process in which the employee has certain rights (e.g. the right to be assisted by a union representative, see the evidence against them, respond to allegations).
Not really. Per your link, employees are protected in a very narrow subset of cases - where what they are doing on social media is 100% protected labour activity. But firing employees arbitrarily for social media posts (outside of those narrow protections) is completely fine. That's completely backwards from how it works in most of the developed world, where the burden of proof is on the employer who must show that the firing was for a permitted cause, rather than the employee having to show that they were fired for a non-permitted cause.
The "consequences" thing is one of my biggest pet peeves.
Literally everything is a consequence of something else. If you cut someone off in traffic, they might hunt you down and shoot you. That is a possible consequence. It doesn't mean it's a just or appropriate consequence or that we as a society should allow it.
Protip: quoting Scott Adams, noted mediocre cartoonist turned right-wing gadfly, is not a good idea to convince me that multiple women accusing you of improper behavior are, in fact, full of shit.
And I'm fine with that. If this was the comment I replied to, my reply would be "Could you elaborate on what you find reprehensible on the way he acts and posts?" to try to understand better what's the issue here, but that's it. I don't find your comment biaised against right-wingers.
No, that's an expression of my considered and long-standing opinion that Scott Adams is full of a whole lot of shit, which dates to well before he started making worshipful posts about how Donald Trump is a mind-controlling wizard. The turn to right-wing gadfly is just icing on the cake.
Good lord I cannot believe this is being downvoted. If HN wants to defend that Scott Adams dork for his weird ass beliefs in his magical sexual powers, it says way more about the downvoters than the comment. Where's the defense? I'd really love to hear it right now.
Right, and nothing really exonerated him beyond the one set of Twitter DMs which didn't seem suspect (assuming those were actually the only messages between them). Nobody backed down from their claims.
Guilt should not be related to associations or political beliefs. This is a genuinely dangerous comment. Reserve your judgment for when you’re called for the jury.
Scott Adams's internet presence has evolved into something so incredibly self-absorbed and clueless about anyone else's feelings that quoting his facetious "apology" for the nebulous sins he has not yet committed, but expects to be pilloried for at any second, near the conclusion of this litany of denial, feels like a strong hint that the person quoting it is equally self-absorbed and clueless.
It's not as bad as if this dude used a vaguely-relevant quote from, say, a serial killer, or a general convicted of massive war crimes, but it sure does make me squint at his arguments a bit harder and wonder how much he's leaving out, intentionally or because he never noticed it in the first place.
> I've struggled to understand why so many people have piled on to these absurd accusations without facts.
I watched a similar situation play out in real time. A friend had to fire an employee who wasn't submitting work or even responding to communications. The employe retaliated by using their moderately large social media presence to disparage my friend and her company.
Strangely enough, other people with zero experience in the matter were piling on to support the claims. It seemed they felt obligated to amplify and lend credence to the allegations of one of their social media friends.
The experience was extremely stressful for my friend, but ultimately the former employee cooled off and deleted many of the posts. It's hard to tell how much damage was done in the process, but I was stunned at how someone with zero evidence and an obvious axe to grind could rally such disdain for someone else with little more than a few unsubstantiated social media posts.
> I was stunned at how someone with zero evidence and an obvious axe to grind could rally such disdain for someone else with little more than a few unsubstantiated social media posts.
I feel that this is due to the weird place victimization occupies in our culture combined with how anti-social social media is.
It's extremely easy to issue accusations and threats and have them be read by literally millions of people. You would never dare vocalize these same threats and and accusations publically - and even if you did, in the pre-internet days, it would reach far far fewer people.
At some point we to start thinking about strengthening our libel laws to act as a deterrent to this type of online behaviors. It's depressing to consider MORE litigation as the solution here, but I don't think we can depend on the good nature of people and rationality to ultimately prevail.
This nearly always advantages businesses and the wealthy, especially in false or ambiguous situations, and whistleblowers of all kinds. Litigation is incredibly expensive and slow. Do people really want to spend a house worth and several years on this kind of fight?
(This is why the US felt it necessary to pass laws against UK libel judgements being enforced, it was infringing on US standards of free speech)
Whistleblowers have plenty of protections and can be exempted. Libel can be stated such that they only apply to private matters between individuals, where accusations that do not reach the felony level - which is exactly what is going on here. I have no doubt we could protect all interests, while limiting the power of the wealthy and powerful.
Whistleblowers have functionally no protections, I don't know how anyone could have knowledge of whistleblower cases and claim otherwise.
Any attorney will tell you - if you are going to blow the whistle on some entity that is powerful, you will lose your job, your home, your ability to work in your field, and your life will be in legal hell for decades.
With the intent of siccing a mob of people on someone to harass them online? No, never. In the article, the problem is not that the women discussed the fact that they had received harassing emails, but that they attributed those emails to a particular person without any proof that that is true.
"I received an anonymous harassing email" - true statement, not libel
"I received an anonymous harassing email and it was definitely from this guy" - if you can't prove it, could be libel.
There are several people who have severely traumatized me by actions they took to harm my body, violate my sexual consent, and/or manipulate my life so that I was under their power in ways I didn’t agree to.
I couldn’t imagine convincing a jury of any of these. If you make saying they happened a criminal exposure for me, I can’t warn others of the danger those people put me in, or even process my pain and grief, without fear of losing a court battle I have no chance of winning.
I’m sensitive to the damage false claims can do, but I think it’s unreasonable to say that people should be liable in a court of law to prove things that are private and unprovable. And it has a chilling effect, where people who’ve experienced similar trauma will be discouraged from sharing their experience because the risk is too high.
It’s already dangerous to accuse anyone with any kind of public presence of anything, people will defend them to the point of harassment, stalking and violence, out of pure loyalty.
Adding legal repercussions for stating that a thing happened where no one could produce conclusive evidence to confirm or deny it just means more people suffer privately without even the recourse of telling anyone what happened.
NAL, but I don't think talking to your friends and acquaintances privately rises to the level of libel or slander, or at least it would be very difficult to prove if it did.
What is the alternative that you would like to see? Should we be able to destroy any person we want simply by making an accusation without evidence? Should we throw out presumption of innocence and fair trials and just chuck people in jail the moment someone accuses someone of a crime?
If someone is making a public accusation with the intent of destroying someone's livelihood and reputation, I don't think it is too much to ask that we have some way of verifying that the accusation is true.
> NAL, but I don't think talking to your friends and acquaintances privately rises to the level of libel or slander, or at least it would be very difficult to prove if it did.
The suggestion was to “strengthen libel laws”, presumably to reverse this.
> What is the alternative that you would like to see? Should we be able to destroy any person we want simply by making an accusation without evidence? Should we throw out presumption of innocence and fair trials and just chuck people in jail the moment someone accuses someone of a crime?
I’m actually more or less comfortable with the existing US laws. Accusing someone publicly of harming them in an unprovable way is relatively protected speech. I’m opposed to changing that to penalize people who were hurt by someone, want to disclose the fact that it happened, and couldn’t possibly survive a trial they never initiated.
> If someone is making a public accusation with the intent of destroying someone's livelihood and reputation, I don't think it is too much to ask that we have some way of verifying that the accusation is true.
Ok, I did not interpret strengthen libel laws to mean extending them to private conversations. Instead, I was thinking of something to deter Internet pile-ons like the article discussed.
Where is that line? I keep most of my Internet life relatively private. But this means I’m already hesitant to use the platforms I do have to describe things people did to harm me. I’m the one who’d be piled on if it got an audience. Adding the potential for expensive lawsuits just means I’ll be more hesitant to warn anyone that someone did something harmful, to me or to anyone else I believe. Why do I have to keep these conversations private?
We have laws because there are dishonest people. You might as well ask why do we have laws against stealing? I'm an honest person and if I go take something from someone's house without asking, I'll just bring it right back with no harm done. Some people aren't honest, though.
I... don’t understand what you’re trying to convince me of here? Are you trying to morally equate me hypothetically naming people who’ve abused me to stealing from them, if I couldn’t defend a non-legal claim of what happened in court? I sincerely do not understand what you’re saying should change.
I understand that you are telling the truth. Do you understand that sometimes people do not tell the truth?
The question is what level of consequence are you saying we should inflict on people before some kind of evidence beyond an accusation is required?
If it's "I tell my friends about what happened, and then they turn down opportunities to work with that person". I don't think anyone would or could sue for libel about that. I am not proposing that they be able to. I apologize if I gave the impression that that is what I was proposing.
If it's "I make an accusation, and that person should then be unemployed and destitute and indelibly branded a sexual predator for the rest of their life" then maybe somewhere in between those two extremes, there is a point where some evidence is required, and the level of harm being done to the accused requires some stronger justification. Maybe current libel laws do not accurately delineate that point because of the advent of the Internet and the possibility for a person to experience widespread harassment based on a few claims going viral. Is that reasonable?
No, I don’t think that’s reasonable. In the spirit of “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”, I don’t think adding more legal liability serves anyone. Moreover, it serves even less people who already have few resources to redress wrongs.
It’s not like this concept of “mob ruined my life” is some new concept, it’s something victims of abuse experience or withhold their stories to avoid, and have forever.
Remember when this claim was made about a now sitting SCOTUS justice? His life had been ruined? Not at all. But at least one of his accusers was so afraid for her life that she went into hiding. Imagine how much more dangerous it would be for her if she were legally penalized for “ruining his life”, which she didn’t do, but absolutely became a part of the anti-cancel-culture script. Imagine how that could be abused by someone in such a high place of power.
People who’ve been hurt by others don’t need to be legally scrutinized for saying so. If it’s in the court of public opinion, the truth comes out. We know this because the few cases where people lie are always repeated by people motivated to penalize truth telling.
I’m afraid to name people who’ve hurt me here, people no one on HN knows, because I fear retribution. Adding the possibility that I might be tangled up in years of legal battles I can’t afford simply for saying what happened is utterly terrifying to me. And that’s coming from a place of relative privilege where I don’t expect half the danger other accusers might expect.
No. There should not be legal penalties for describing abuse without legal proof.
So is there any point at which you would say it matters whether an accusation is true or not? Is it only if there’s a criminal investigation?
> People who’ve been hurt by others don’t need to be legally scrutinized for saying so.
The point is that not every person who makes an accusation is someone who has been hurt by others. If there is no scrutiny allowed, how are we supposed to tell which is which? You're looking at this from the perspective of the person making the accusation, where you can know with certainty that is true. Someone on the outside doesn't have that ability.
> So is there any point at which you would say it matters whether an accusation is true or not? Is it only if there’s a criminal investigation?
It always matters whether an accusation is true. Penalizing accusers doesn’t produce fewer false accusations. It discourages true accusations.
> You're looking at this from the perspective of the person making the accusation, where you can know with certainty that is true. Someone on the outside doesn't have that ability.
You’ve completely misunderstood my perspective. I’m looking at it from the perspective of the person afraid to make an accusation.
Nobody is saying we should penalize people for making accusations. Being asked to substantiate your claims is not a penalty. It should be understood that people will ask that when you make a public claim, especially if you are asking for something to happen as a result of that claim.
I'm not sure what we gain by encouraging people to make unprovable accusations. From the outside perspective, people will be predisposed to believe one way or another, and in the absence of any evidence they'll just go to their predispositions and a lot of irrelevant argument will take place back and forth with no possible resolution, because there is no real evidence. Why is this helpful or desirable?
> Penalizing accusers doesn’t produce fewer false accusations. It discourages true accusations.
Why would the rate of true accusations go down while the rate of false accusations remain the same? My intuition is that they'd both go down, with false accusations decreasing more than true accusations.
This is absurd. The “mob” that “ruined” his life did no such thing. Multiple accusers had credible accounts, media did scrutinize their accounts and determined that one wasn’t credible while others were. He wasn’t “cancelled”, he has a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the most powerful country in all human history. This “mob” theory is ridiculous. Yet one of his accusers was so afraid for her life she went into hiding. This is exactly why I’m opposed to penalizing accusers.
This is a very challenging interaction. I will try to keep a very even tone in this message.
The parent's last paragraph seems to set up a strawman, an extreme that seems to me to covered by current libel laws. (Is it not? Explain if I'm wrong.)
It is _possible_ that current libel laws don't "accurately delineate that point", but I am looking for a stronger argument in favor of change.
Based on the posts here, I think that the role and power of "viral"-ity is not well understood. In uncertain situations I would like to seek a clearer understanding instead of simply turning to legislative solutions - surely the question that will come up is "where is the line" and if we can't say we're not ready for a law.
@eyelidlessness Thank you for a very measured set of responses; they are beyond my skill or patience.
Thank you for this. I think you’ve expressed a lot of what I didn’t have emotional space to say, with at least as much skill and patience. I appreciate you joining in
I really hope the people who think I should feel even more restricted by what I can say about people who’ve sexually assaulted me will tell me why, instead of just making it more shitty to even admit it happened without even naming anyone who harmed me. Stay classy HN.
I think there is a distinction between "say" and "publish". NAL but libel deals with published falsehoods, these are not private conversations or communications. Communicating a message to millions on twitter or saying it on TV is different from talking to friends and family.
> what I can say about people who’ve sexually assaulted me
Remember you can still relatively freely say/publish your opinion; tell a million people they are a monster, creep, treated you poorly etc. But publicly accusing someone of a specific crime or sexual-impropriety is a serious allegation, and to me it seems ok that the accused has a way to legally challenge it and require proof.
So if I were to name the people who have sexually assaulted me, here in a comment—which I’ve already said I’m terrified to do even though they don’t have an audience here to my knowledge—but if I did so, just said so to an audience, I should be legally liable to prove it? Because I didn’t keep it private?
I think the accused should have the right to legally challenge a public defamatory statement. In this case... it probably wouldn't be a very strong case, just from a quick google search, my guess is they would struggle with 1 & 4 below. For 1) In civil, this is probably preponderance of evidence (>50% true) vs beyond a reasonable doubt in criminal. For 4) Theoretically this has no impact, you are just screaming into the void and they don't even know about it. But it could cause real damage, this is a highly trafficked site, maybe they loose their job or their spouse sees this and divorces them etc.
"To prove prima facie defamation, a plaintiff must show four things:
1) a false statement purporting to be fact;
2) publication or communication of that statement to a third person;
> If you can't prove it didn't happen, denying the accusation is libel. Fair is fair.
Yes, Bill Cosby was sued this way. He was accused publicly, he denied the accusations & they sued him for defamation. Everything depends though, it can be harder to show a denial caused damages or is not an opinion ie; I disagree with the characterization of events.
> Maybe the real problem is firing someone from their job due to non credible accusations
Shouldn't an accusation have real potential consequences, like employment termination? In that case sue the accuser for libel.
> If you can back up what you’re saying, libel isn’t a concern
How are you going to pay to back this up in court? Evidencing these things is tricky. As you've spotted, it doesn't matter whether what you say is true, only whether you can back it up. Oh, and you may need to lodge a bond with court in case you lose. Best re-mortgage your house.
The UK has extremely strong libel law and yet people libel each other all the time, because cases cost in excess of £100,000.
Oh, and declaring private eyewitness testimony to be worthless makes it entirely impossible to criminally prosecute rape and sexual assault.
Except Libel isn't on the same criminal level as rape and sexual assault. Libel is a mostly civil affair and should be dealt with as a civil offense, not criminal, and since its mostly civil, it can have a higher requirement of proof, as weird as it sounds.
>If you can back up what you’re saying, libel isn’t a concern.
This is not true. The unfortunate reality is that facts _don't_ matter in the realm of public opinion. They never have.
BUT, you're going to say, "I'm talking about libel, which is litigated in the court of law, not public opinion."
If that is indeed your response, I would suggest you might better familiarize yourself with the actual happenings in civil court cases. They can absolutely be just as insane, and they can absolutely act with the same lack of justice we see in other places.
I really wish most people had the type of integrity you're describing, but the uncomfortable reality is that they do not. People are going to believe the thing that makes them feel better, not the thing that is true.
Truth is not an absolute defense for other legal cases in the US. The legal system is statistically successful at getting innocent people to take plea deals and legally does not require the penalties for a losing party.
I think we need to move away from the American Rule for litigation fees to the English Rule. So we incentive people for telling the truth when pursuing legal action.
> At some point we to start thinking about strengthening our libel laws to act as a deterrent to this type of online behaviors.
I am unconvinced that there is anything that could be done to strengthen libel laws that would have this effect short of also shutting down essential freedom of expression, given that Western regimes with stronger libel laws are not free of it, and our libel laws tend to go pretty much right up to the limit federal courts have found the First Amendment to impose on them.
It's tricky because these accusations resonate because they remind us of things that really happen. (and in fact, lies can be formulated for maximum impact when truthtelling is usually more nuanced)
Because powerful people have strong lawyers, the tools that the falsely accused can use to clear their name can be used, to more effect, by the guilty.
There are no easy solutions here. The past looked calm only because people often had no recourse unless a newspaper took up their cause.
> You would never dare vocalize these same threats and and accusations publically - and even if you did, in the pre-internet days, it would reach far far fewer people.
It would reach far less people, yes, but we used to burn witches, too, so it seems that internet mobs are just a modern manifestation of that.
“It is absolutely essential that we believe Jussie Smollett. If we don’t, other people who haven’t been attacked might not have the courage to come forward.”
"I'm passing this quote around, not attributing it to being satire, and then when that's pointed out saying it's exaggerated and it works because it accurately represents people's beliefs, even though I said it was exaggerated."
The article itself sums it up as: "Believe victims. Don’t let this story plant doubt in your mind when it’s possible that unconscious bias already lives there."
You must not apply critical thought to accusations, because, of course, you are racist/sexist/whatever and cannot be trusted to think critically.
I see this so often with fake news. People spread it because they want to believe it because it confirms their worldview. So when you point out the story is fake, they insist that it might as well be true.
Social media companies seem to optimize for virality. In such circumstances there are users who will learn to wield such capabilities to suit their goals
That's the thing, the "internet mobs" are literally the result of "engagement" they optimize for so they have no incentive to stop it and all the more incentive to facilitate and perpetuate it actually.
There's a similar tendency I've noticed with these, where people who have met or interacted with the person pile on with vague statements. This is a popular one: "I met him once and knew something was off! He had a creepy vibe".
I'm sure it reflects their interaction in some cases, but it's so common with these witch hunts (including the one in question here), there may be more to it. Motivated reasoning or something?
Some of the more specific ones could be ex-post re-rationalizing. Like when someone discovers their neighbor was a crook, suddenly his or her demeanor in retrospect was suspicious, or had wide eyes or had eyes close together, said hi but said it fast, or never said hi, or something whatever it is that sets them apart from non crooks.
Guess this is a reminder why you shouldn't stick your dick in crazy. But imagine having to deal with someone like this after already getting married to them.
After reading through the post on notion, I found it "impressive" that OP has dated with so many toxic persons over years. Is this normal? Or is OP self an outlier to have had so many toxic relationships?
Did I read the thread incorrectly? From there it seems that OP has dated exactly one person out of the bunch, another one was a friend and the rest acquaintances or passersby?
When these attacks take on a racial or gender-focused hue, I think they end up having a terribly ironic effect: further isolating the group they sought to protect (e.g., POC, women, etc). That is, they win the battle, but lose the war. Each of these stories reinforces in my mind to not associate with those that are higher on the oppression totem pole. I know it is not their fault, and I feel bad for doing so, but the risk/reward simply does not make sense. It helps that I'm a loner anyway.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26612918 for the effect I'm speaking of. People will continue to distance themselves as (primarily American) society continues to be a flashpoint and Twitter a flashmob.
Yes - and it's driving people further into tribes where the only way they feel "safe" is in and around their own "kind". This isn't civilization, but a regression and if it goes on for a few more generations it could be very damaging to our social fabric.
I just hope it's a weird early-21st century "intellectual" movement that eventually dies out.
Until relatively recently, women and people from racial and ethnic minorities were pre-cancelled. And if they got too noisy, there was far worse on the menu---the first year in US history without a lynching was something like 1952, and that's literal torture, mutilation, and death; not having people say bad things about you on the Internet.
Was it more civil? Yeah, sure. It would only be spoken about in public rarely and the better classes of people would certainly never face it. It would certainly be more civil, as long as everyone stayed in their place.
An entirely different class of bad behaviors that were commonplace in the past has absolutely no bearing on whether or not social media makes us worse people and just confuses the issue for no reason.
I think this sort of thinking vastly overestimates the frequency with which these sorts of things happen. The risk seems high because you hear stories all the time, but that is because those stories are interesting and are shared widely. You don’t read about the 99.999% of the time that nothing bad happens.
This is like watching the evening news and deciding not to go outside ever because you are just sure you will murdered.. after all, every night they show a new murder!
I am no longer willing to mentor female coders one on one after witnessing a friend get fired from allegations from a mentally unstable female peer. She ended up getting a second dude fired, until on her third attempt the claims fell apart, and it became clear she had fabricated all 3 claims. Too late for the first two.
This victimization cult has now caused me to adopt the "billy graham rule" that I used to make fun of fundamentalist Christians about.
And in another hilarious twist, vast numbers of HN members (likely the majority) encouraged this situation to happen.
Go back through any of the old threads at the height of the metoo campaign. The vast majority were on the side of the mob and anyone who tried to talk sense was down-voted, flagged and accused of -isms for pointing out where this would lead.
What shocked me the most was his listing of "the quality of my relationships with people" and what looks like people pretending to be friends towards him while sacrificing him for publicity behind his back.
I'd say the main point to be learned from this story is that you need to be very careful whom you consider a true friend, as opposed to just an acquaintance. Because they might not care as much about you as you care about them.
I wish this kind of behavior was new. It's not, it's just the latest version of Vigilantism. It's the result of people believing that the rule of law is insufficient; of thinking that they are a better enforcer of what they perceive as the rule of law.
I'm not sure humanity as a whole can get away from this. Just being different is enough to trigger people's feelings of "other", to become the target of a mob fueled by hatred and fear. And everyone is capable of being different.
But, while we're not going to get away from it as a people, we can get away from it as individuals. Don't join the mobs. Don't react to the initial outrage that we feel when reading something. Sleep on it, and prefer to let the law deal with it (or work to change the laws so it can deal with it) over taking it into our own hands.
About 10 years ago I was harassed for months. In my case I wasn't able to find out who it was but they were able do some damage to my marriage and relationship with friends but above all to my well being. When they first started I tended to take my favorite approach in life against such things which is to just ignore the emails and the messages that were being sent to me as well as to my partner but when in a relationship with someone you can't choose not to play the game.
This is all under the bridge now. Since then I've had almost zero social media presence. Internet as I learned about and explored in the 90s and 00s is long gone and what's left is a wasteland to spectate.
Any appearance of civilized intelligence is pure imitation, as a rule. Ritual, conformity, hive-politics and gratuitous feces-throwing are still the dominant paradigm. Don't let the ability to operate complex machinery fool you.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 322 ms ] threadThe only community I interact with candidly tends to be this one. I don't post on Twitter, Facebook, etc. because the vast majority of mainstream social media users (a) don't tend to have good-faith debates on any intellectually-interesting topics, and (b) will always find something to rip out of context and crucify you.
But this is easier said than done. Dopamine's a helluva' drug.
But social media turns everything into live TV, potentially analysed with more rigor than any TV show ever witnessed, and with algorithms implicitly optimised to make the things most visible which generate the most powerful emotions. And it doesn't seem like the social media concept is going to disappear soon, it's just part of everyday life for many.
I think your "best solution" aligns well with what the OP appeared to be doing, and he still burned.
It's important to note that just because the mob forms on social media doesn't mean its consequences are limited to social media.
OP has a huge Twitter presence (600k+ followers), and I guess my point is when you have that kind of presence you open yourself up to being a "pseudo-public" person. Sometimes, you need to do this (if you're a politician, for example). But usually you don't.
People will get more riled up when the person they're crucifying is famous - clout-chasing is a real thing. Although you (sadly) sometimes have exceptions to this rule, so you're right that it's not a complete solution.
He has 16k followers https://twitter.com/pasql
16 thousand people follow him. That's way more than enough to be considered a 'public person'
To think that we now file it as “not that much” is something I can’t wrap my mind around.
It's important to remember that there are as many people following 10K people as are being followed by 10K people. They aren't really paying attention to 10K people's photos of their lunches or stray observations on Ohio sports.
A good easy contrast is the “phenom” of how flighty, not loyal, and weaker of a connection TikTok followers are. I believe it is very hard to go from being big on Tiktok to elsewhere. Contrasted by other social media.
Also. This is all coming from some one who has never had more than 200 of so followers on any social media.
This. Thank you. I have unconsciously wondered into such debates on social media cesspools, and approaching it like I do with HN, which is atleast more logical
Contrast that to pure engagement-focused social networks like Facebook or Twitter, which do the opposite: prioritize showing flamebait, because people are engaging with it and therefore it must necessarily be quality content!
Voting manages the day-to-day and gives them signal to work with, but ultimately open communities (i.e. that anyone can join) need active moderation to remain stable over the long term.
Same here. Even so, I make it a point to keep it positive, and about myself.
Interestingly, that gets people painting me as "stuck up," or a "goody two-shoes," and they attack me anyway.
Meh. Whatevs.
That's one of the reasons why people are so quick to join the fray and throw a punch. They want to be that one quick Tweet that goes viral, gets them thousands of followers and builds their brand.
There are a lot of benefits of being an influencer, but it has its downsides too.
(s/influencer/celebrity for a few decades ago...)
The graph of meaningful human relationships is always going to be small and consist only of bidirectional edges. It's a road to accepting that and forging self-worth based on the people you know and care about, and who know and care about you, not the people who will never know you let alone care about you.
It takes active role models, introspection and life-long seeking of enlightened approaches, to break the mold. Few do, but when one do, many can follow.
HN is one of the better places by far, and I think it takes active action by someone at the top to hold the line.
On here we also get extreme reactions still though - The only reason apple does X is because they are evil and want to spy on you etc.
One idea you see in nature and also developing countries is camouflage. You basically give your kids a very generic name so they blend in, harder to search etc. In developing countries people really operate with nicknames a lot more and sometimes have multiple "real" names.
I don't think politics in general as a topic should be banned, but there is exactly zero intellectual gratification in reading a thread where I can predict without reading what the opposing sides are going to say and the respective counter-arguments.
I just can't see how thread #32768 about affirmative action or thread #65537 about abortion can be more interesting than the previous one. You'll just be served defrosted opinions.
https://www.reason.so/
So participating "in the public sphere" was just not worth the risk. I had no idea what view I express today might in the future be deemed unacceptable. Even just being visible on there makes you more of a target–it's harder to have a pile-on on, say, someone's blog.
I miss twitter and facebook at times (quit facebook for different reasons), but overall it's a huge relief to not be contributing to those ecosystems.
perhaps sticking to purely technical posts may help, it is hard for me to say what drives engagement in these platforms.
It is fine line to walk
I think the best solution here is to speak up on behalf of those who are unfairly attacked, in spite of the negative fallout from getting involved. The worst thing that can happen in cases like this is when nobody supports the victim. That can be profoundly traumatizing.
For a more in-depth look at the impacts of internet mob attacks, I'd recommend this TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/jon_ronson_when_online_shaming_goe...
The reality is that there is no easy way forward, no simple answer:
You don't know the truth any better than the mindless mob. If someone is accused of sexual assault or harassment, do you want to risk defending them, only to find out later that you guessed wrong? When the video comes out showing the crime, do you want your name permanently associated with trying to protect them?
The witch hunt / lynching / mob attack is always the wrong act, regardless of what someone has done. Perhaps the best you can do is to point that out, but that is also difficult. People will not read the nuance and assume you are on the other side. And you only have so much social capital - when everyone blocks you after the first time you stand up, what do you do after that?
I've thought about that, but your reputation is being destroyed. You'll offer no defense? You'll let everyone who you value get that impression of you? You'll allow it to become permanent, public record for anyone who ever looks you up with a search engine?
There is no defense against the barrage of a Twitter mob, doesn’t matter how hard you try. It also seems that the better the reputation you have, the more difficult it is to recover.
What if the people you know are reading it, and it affects your friendships, your job, your business partners, your reptuation?
None of this is to say that you should be a bad person online, or otherwise take advantage of anonymity. Being anonymous just gives you a healthy personal shield, and the option to "cash out" and walk away from that identity, if you so desire.
I honestly always tought it was common sense.
> None of this is to say that you should be a bad person online, or otherwise take advantage of anonymity. Being anonymous just gives you a healthy personal shield, and the option to "cash out" and walk away from that identity, if you so desire.
I wouldn't call it anonymity. You can read all of the posts I've made on hacker news by going through my posts (although I can't really prove that to you). My identity just isn't linked to who I am IRL, and both aren't linked to my twitter, and the three aren't linked to my discord. That means that I can be appreciated and judged as an indivudal on HN, but it won't have consequences on other platforms. On the other hand, if I make a really really popular twitter post I can't profit from it here. As you said, it's of course not a reason or way to be a bad person. I just think it's important for me to separate my different identities.
If you're not going to be awful online, nobody will try to figure out who you are from a pseudonymous handle. But your employer/potential employer will certainly google your name.
EDIT: What? You don't need to be online. Other people can put you online. Whether or not Donglegate was legitimate, clearly the mechanism exists.
I didn't have any major following, it's mostly just a couple of friends and I will start a stream so my buddies can watch and we can chat about the game. We had been doing that for an hour or so before my interview just to calm my nerves a bit and kill time. My interviewers were watching that stream.
Anyways, it was pretty shocking to have the interviewer just straight up admit they dug me up, in detail. I felt pretty invaded. To their credit (or perhaps mine) they didn't feel any of my online activity was troubling. I did the interview, was offered the job and turned it down even though I was unemployed and pretty broke. I didn't feel comfortable working for them.
To this day I don't really know how they dug me up. I tried it afterwards myself and I couldn't. As a result I dialed my online presence back quite a bit. I am semi-active here but almost nowhere else. I don't really stream anymore.
I don't remember for certain, it was a few years ago. It's unlikely though. I don't give references by default and I am almost never asked for them. I don't recall if they asked for them, but I don't think so.
Also the overlap of people who I share my online activity with and people I would use as professional references is extremely small. Maybe literally one person.
It is probably something very small like accidentally linking an email address to an account I shouldn't have.
I found this compelling as a response to the idea of cancel culture.
It's kind of interesting, but I think if anybody wanted to cancel me, they'd have a hard time. I have almost no twitter/facebook presence, no linkedin at all, most of my close friends and family don't give a shit about what a bunch of Twitter randos think, and I work at a small enough company that I'd probably get my case heard.
I realize that some of that is luck and not just "positioning" but why give yourself a larger attack surface than you need to at a time when one wrong comment from 20 years ago can end you?
Just walk away from it all.
Social media was the connective tissue that gave rise to the internet mob, but neither the OPs behavior on social media, nor his response on social media, had any impact on the outcomes. Nor were the outcomes limited to affecting his social media presence. As per the original article, OP got nailed for comments from a twitter account he didn't run, and whose true owner publicly confessed to owning it.
That is, just because you walk away from social media doesn't mean that social media has walked away from you.
What other random born-in-1937 person without a social media account would receive that level of interest or attention?
Which makes me think: who are these people with enough time of their hands to be morality warriors on internet? Also who are these _friends_ who jumps on conclusion without allowing for a defense? I shouldn't be difficult, in this digitalized world, to provide solid proof of wrongdoing.
I may not be the most aware of social cues, or maybe it's a cultural thing, but some of these people seems like absolute sociopaths.
Maybe shy sociopaths? They wouldn't be a sociopath face-to-face, but give them the disconnect of being behind a screen, and the sociopathy comes out.
I wonder if this person is referring more to their social group. I get the impression that there are groups of "friends" that are really more of a social group and are all walking on eggshells around one another re orthodoxy and and at the same time poised to jump on anyone who is perceived to do something against their group values.
Sort of like the situation in 1984, Winston, Syme, Ampleforth, Parson, are all "friends" in some sense but effectively would denounce each other immediately for anything and feel the need to insert little "there is a war going on of course" type platitudes in conversation.
Maybe young people? I know that when I was younger (around high school) and more active on twitter, I supported everything progressive because I thought it was the right thing to do, without looking too much into the facts. Fortunately I never had a bigger reach than a few dozen of people with the same ideas as me, and never directly attacked people or insulted them or anything, but I wonder if it's because of virtue or just that I'm more shy than most people.
I'm glad I grew up and don't do this kind of thing anymore, but I can't say I don't understand why people would do this. Maybe education about this would help? But on the other hand voices that says "there are two sides to every stories" often get drowned in righteous fury, and I'm not sure I would have listened to them.
I've touched on this in another comment, in another thread - if we are going to assume that people have the right to say whatever the hell they want, how do you reconcile that with the rights of a mob to pigpile someone for speaking their mind?
The short answer is: "You can't."
The long answer is: "You can't, because when two groups are in such a conflict, you either explicitly censor one, or implicitly censor the other."
You can make the same sort of point without such language. Rather than asserting that "everyone who beleives X also believes Y and that is contradictory", you should assert "believing X and Y together is contradictory".
The problem is how we respond to what we hear. The core casue of the issue is treating online vigilante outrage mobs as an acceptable activity.
Certainly not in the real world. I was very angry yesterday, I wish I could delete that comment
Maybe it's something of a reaction to these frustrations that some progressive circles have adopted this knee-jerk zero tolerance stance, where no crime or perceived crime is too small to attempt to silence someone for. YouTube film commentator Lindsay Ellis went through a bunch of this recently, and basically dealt with it by making a 1.5 hour video where she itemizes everything she's been accused of, and drinks her way through explaining and apologizing for all of it (including, wretchedly, sharing about her own history with a sexual assault). [2]
[1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7aWz8q_IM4
In this case the accusation is that the accused used completely anonymous means to harass the accuser. How the accuser knows that the accused is responsible is not stated.
The problems here seem obvious.
However, that fails to take into account any context of the particular “cancellation”.
eg, A situation with damning screenshots of lewd DMs are pretty ‘smoking gun’, and the barometer of “good friends would publicly support me” feels like an insane expectation when (in this hypothetical instance) the person did a bad thing.
Perhaps being cancelled isn’t the solution (because we’re all flawed) but the automatic expectation of character references come a scandal isn’t fair on one’s friends.
If defending a person, in the face of prima facie evidence, has the result of preserving their reputation and status (and keeping the reputation and status of the accuser in their original state) then it doesn’t feel useful or good.
And I take the opportunity to nudge them and ask, "They did a bad thing. Does that mean they're always bad? Can they make things better? Should we forgive them? How do we know when to forgive them?" (not in a single tirade; these are just questions I drop over time.)
Because, in anticipation of the fact that they're definitely going to fuck up along the way, I want them to learn that mistakes and failures and even doing bad things don't make them irrevocably bad - that ultimately, the most important thing is making amends / trying again / etc. That your worst decision is not the sum total of who you are.
I don't see why I should try so hard to teach that to my kid, and then "disavow" friends who may have fucked up.
1. helping a friend hide the body
2. telling your friend they are in the wrong and you will help them through the consequences IE likely charges, court, gaol time, life rebuilding etc.
However (in my hypothetical scenario which was meant to challenge the utility of blanket statements of support), a message of support does effectively act as a counterweight to an accusation, and unless one possesses all of the facts it may have the effect of laundering the reputation of somebody who deserves criticism (though I’d argue that in most instances, cancellation is very very over the top as a penalty).
Sadly, the idea that a friend can be a loyal one, while insisting on good behavior, seems alien today.
This sounds very Catholic
With the exception of some particularly abhorrent things, I'm not sure I'd consider myself a friend to someone if I'm not willing to support them even if they're in the wrong. That doesn't mean lying for them or trying to pretend it wasn't bad, but I would expect myself to push back on mischaracterizations of them (positive or negative!) and help them navigate the consequences.
That is, I am not going to defend somebody who won’t even be honest and open about their wrongdoing.
The thing is, what tell you it's actually mischaracterizations. You can believe me, I'm not the same in front of my parents, versus in front of my boss or in front of my friends. I'm not saying I'm doing anything bad, but there's trait that I'll show more or less depending on the involved party.
It can also pretty easily change between public and private settings, I don't have much situation for which it happens for me, except obviously my SO, but I have known people that does adapt to my more relax personality when they are alone with me. Nothing nefarious in my case, but a good example on how in private someone may act differently based on the other party.
So sure I agree that you may support them, tell your own story about that person, but you still need to understands that it's only your story, that has nothing to do with anyone else story.
I was effectively trying to say “Imagine a scenario where the wrongdoing was basically certain”, for the purposes of focusing on the ‘backing up friends with a public statement’ part of the situation.
I know that in reality this (probability of guilt) can’t readily be uncoupled from the result (the statement) but I asked people to imagine a situation of certain ‘guilt’.
>It seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don’t really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don’t regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. You forgive a conventional duel just as you forgive a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn’t anything to be forgiven.
And as Scott continues:
>Actual forgiveness, the kind the priest needs to cultivate to forgive evildoers, is really really hard. The fake forgiveness the townspeople use to forgive the people they like is really easy, so they get to boast not only of their forgiving nature, but of how much nicer they are than those mean old priests who find forgiveness difficult and want penance along with it.
I think about this a lot when I see the perennial discourse on canceling. Scott talks about this argument in terms of people being canceled by leftists, but I think it applies almost as well to people on the opposite side handwringing about cancellation. There are lots of great points to be made about the corrosive effects of cancellation mob rule, but I sometimes wonder if most of the left-right difference on this issue comes down to how strongly they feel about the infraction in question, rather than any level-headed consideration of what policy would lead to the best society.
I would say this is pretty clearly the case. Most of the time the question seems to be "is this cancel-worthy": the difference in your reaction to the "cancellation" of, say, J.K. Rowling vs. Nikole Hannah-Jones probably depends more on your feeling about what they've done than on your stance on "cancellation" itself.
My point is that nobody did a bad thing until someone actually did a bad thing, and I think that's most people's gripe with 'cancellation'.
Not really. Fake screenshots of such things are trivial to create.
For example: https://streamable.com/zcgqie
Better that you stay employable so you can lend a financial hand if they aren't and protect your psychological health so you can be there for them in other ways.
So sure, pray for the courage to throw yourself physically in front of an unstoppable train... but also pray for the wisdom to know better. :)
I can understand why someone feeling the judgement of a mob would think this but it's clearly just a simplification of what's really going on. Each person in that mob is an individual with their own beliefs, thought process, context and so on. What can feel like an avalanche of hate may simply be many individual instances of misunderstanding or confusion. To believe the people who are against you are not individuals but a single angry entity is going to make it harder deal with psychologically and harder to come up with any possible remedy.
I don't really know what the remedy would be but I would guess that it would involve a process of divide-and-conquer while addressing each individual's specific concerns.
But to me the worse is by far Twitter. There are plenty of random people who have a disproportionate number of followers compared to the quality of their posts. And as a result can do these kind of mods. Which are amplified by retweets, something that barely exists in other social media.
Random people can have too much power. As a society we should really prevent anyone to have more than a certain reach, like for example 5k people viewing a post. If you want to have a bigger reach you should apply to get a professional account and be regulated.
It doesn't get as much scrutiny in the press though, because it's the home of journalists.
So the common persons voice should be rate limited? Only those 'qualified' should be able to have a larger impact?
Who makes the rules in this situation?
Yes, to both. To go along with what the OP was saying, the common person should have to get the attention of someone with a "professional account" in order to get their voice amplified. Of course, that's assuming "professional accounts" actually mean something and aren't handed out like blue checkmarks on Twitter.
On Faceobook, the only people who can flood my notifications are people have I as friends, or maybe friends of friends. On Twitter, it's everyone, including people who are just there to be abusive.
Rate limiting people so that they could only post/vote/etc once per day, for example, or perhaps amplifying the vote by the account age might work to bring more attention to more mature voices.
Why? What benefit does this provide to everyone? How is this not just going to silence minority opinion?
WhatsApp did something similar where you cannot share a popular message to more than one, since it was used to spread a call to violence in India. [1]
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/7/21211371/whatsapp-message-...
Yet driving that outrage up is what gets Twitter eyeballs thus revenue, so there is an incentive for that platform to generate this sort of behaviour. Twitter absolutely loved Trump presence, they made good money out of him.
https://twitter.com/OhNoSheTwitnt/status/1397629835757883395
"No thanks, Ted Bundy movie. If I want a story about a white guy who murders women I’ll just watch the news."
Right. White guys, they are the worst. Why is it that I can go on Twitter and within 2 minutes find hate speech attacking the group I've been assigned to? Btw, this is pretty tame. I could find worse with very little effort.
Twitter generally discourages anonymity but also has almost no protection against your content being instantly thrust into a national spotlight.
"Cancel culture" is primarily enforcing things that (a) have not reached the same political consensus as codified law, like laws against theft or murder, and (b) are enforced by impulse, hearsay, and mob mentality.
The entire point of justice was to be less tribal. Social justice now is the opposite. It's who has the biggest tribal cannon they can point at someone they disagree with. Not whether the facts support the claim.
Democracy is not for individual cases. Jury selection throws out 95% of people because there are so many biases that make democracy terrible for this kind of analysis.
No letting a pool of people decide guilt based on literally no evidence. That’s insane.
- Utility-like services should not be allowed to refuse service to individuals without clear reason.
#2 is already true in some cases, but as usual, the real answer is something like "it depends."
Alleging that someone has done something that happens to be a crime aren't a problem, the problem is wilfully alleging crimes outside the court system. The overwhelming majority of the posts that cause these problems either explicitly claim that someone has committed a crime, or explicitly claim that someone has committed an act that is well known to be a crime.
> #2 is already true in some cases
Not really in the US AFAICS? Certain narrowly defined groups are protected against being denied service by private businesses, but there's no broad general protection.
It's human nature to spread rumors and make snap judgements, so I'm not sure how much this can be stopped. But it scares me to see people straight up trying to morally justify it.
Also I will clarify I am speaking from a US-centric perspective. Are you not in the US?
I have seen multiple academic circles seriously come to the consensus that innocent until proven guilty is not good as a general principle. This sort of thing IME occurs on mailing lists or in department meetings, and it has also ramped up considerably in just the last few years. I've never looked for literature on the topic, perhaps the institutions I am affiliated with just suck. But given the many others reporting similar sentiments I suspect there will be some literature on it as a broader phenomenon, at least in the US, down the road.
Every generation thinks they discovered sex. Kids rebel against the hierarchy. Elders complain about "kids these days."
Lather, rinse, repeat.
And Twitter/Facebook/YouTube just grin, raking in the advertising dollars from "engagement." The more people "engaged" in the activity, the better!
I don't think the concept of social media is fundamentally evil. It's dangerous, certainly, but I don't think the core concept must be evil.
Public "social media companies," driven to improve revenue from injecting advertising into streams consisting of repackaging other people's content? Those seem to reliably turn evil.
“There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.” —Idi Amin
1. They believe that "wage slavery" exists. That is, an employee may freely agree to employment conditions under a capitalist view, but under the liberal view, they have not freely agreed since various coercive forces exist that force them agree to the employment conditions. So if a liberal believes a "freely" agreed to job is actually not free due to coercive conditions, then a liberal should also believe that free speech is not free when coercive conditions exist that control speech.
2. The idea that any consequence of free speech is acceptable is easily countered: the consequence of you calling an insane person stupid is they kill you. Obviously no normal person would think that is acceptable. So every normal person, including those liberals with internal inconsistency in this argument, know that the argument should actually be about what consequences are warranted in response to speech.
"[John] Solomon is hiding because he is a coward who enjoys belittling other people from behind a safe veil of invisibility. His is like many sites on the internet, who mock and insult while lacking any courage to own their own words. In public, these cowards would not dare to say the same things, because they know full well that someone just might come after them, knock their yapping blocks off, or in a worst case scenario, go to their house one night and kill them." --Jennifer Diane Reitz, on someone who gave her webcomic a bad review.
Now don't get fooled by what you've been told. Internet Mobs and liberals are unrelated groups, but there are politically inclined groups who are pushing an agenda to discredit liberals by association, this is a fallacy, if you want to learn more about that here's the wikipedia entry: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy
> the argument attacks a person because of the similarity between the views of someone making an argument and other proponents of the argument
So please, don't fall for this, there is no way to know what political values the people refered too in the article that were part of the mob had, lots of internet mobs are conservative, libertarian, communist, socialist, etc. just as well.
One of the liberals I respect most, Noam Chomsky, agrees: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zwojLDxOWGA
Article 12 > No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
This is a liberal value. False accusations go against this, so would most of the US politcal tactics employed to smear and discriminate other parties. It's rampant in today's society, in fact you did just that, by trying to compare people who disagree with you as "idiots". You took attack on their reputation.
Article 23 > Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection
Wage slavery is a catchy attention seeking way of saying that this right is being breached by a lot of employers.
Article 19 > Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
This is where it gets tricky. It is your right to be allowed to tell others on social media about any information or ideas you hold. So it seem to make sense that one could tell people that their ex was abusive and a scumbag. And in turn it is fine for others to tell the ex they believe what they think of it.
But what if your ideas are an attack on someone's else honor or reputation? Are you still free to express them? Would it not then breach the other right to not have honor and reputation attacked?
Well yes, this is a dilemma. One where different people lean more on one right or the other. In the US, people lean more on the right to speech, so it tends to be free game to say whatever you want and thus internet mobs are okay.
Now what I think is that there is no real contradiction. You have the right to express yourself freely, but not to hurt someone else's reputation. So expressing lies and falsehoods to attack someone goes against that person's rights, and your right to express yourself freely is for things you believe to be truthful, or things which don't attack someone's reputation only.
That said, and I won't quote them here, other liberal values say everyone is innocent before proven guilty and have the right to a fair trial. So it would be to the person whose reputation they feel attacked to prove that the other person did in fact express lies and falsehoods to attack their reputation, and that person would need a fair trial and be treated innocent until guilty. Similarly no penal offence can be taken against someone just because there is somebody claiming they are abusive and were harassed by them, a fair trial must be held.
That leaves us with how things are exactly right now. Everyone is free to say what they want to anyone else, and everyone is free to any idea they hold of others. And for the government to interfere in any way, there'd need to be a fair trial that proves that one person's speech was a real attack on someone's reputation, and not just sharing their truths.
There are of course more complexities where speech should result in consequences, but in general, if someone says something than another otherwise unrelated person simply disagrees with, the speaker should not have their relationship with their friends, family, employer, customers, businesses they use, etc harmed. This should be enforced sometimes by law, and sometimes by culture, depending on the rights in play in the particular situation, as you outlined above.
So you do agree that freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences after all.
This is exactly what people who say that also believe. They're not supporting harassment, slander or the suppression of non-harmful political speech, nor are they claiming all consequences for speech are equally valid. Rather, simply stating that there are "complexities where speech should result in consequences."
Where the two sides actually differ (when one strips away the strawmen, trolling and bad faith arguments every iteration of this conversation generates) is what speech should be considered "purely disagreeable" (which is a purely subjective term) and what consequences are valid, which can only be determined on a case by case basis, in context.
I personally believe hateful speech should have consequences, even when it isn't explicitly and immediately threatening harm on a specific individual. An employer has the right not to associate with an employee who publicly makes bigoted statements on social media which the public has associated with the company. The public has the right to oppose such speech where it exists, and to try to convince employers to take action.
An actor or public figure whose politics I disagree with can and should be publicly criticized, and their suffering some financial harm due to the public boycotting their work is a legitimate consequence of their views.
A politician, even a sitting President of the United States, who spreads lies and misinformation can be criticized, fact-checked or even banned from social media. And yes, social media platforms should have the right to determine what can and cannot appear on their platforms, and to moderate that content beyond strict legality.
All of that is clearly within the long-established and generally agreed upon boundaries of free speech and freedom of association. None of it is a carte blanche endorsement of harassment.
We may disagree about the details, or be in violent agreement, but everyone is drawing a line in the sand somewhere.
So you think it's perfectly acceptable to attack an individuals livelihood because you disagree with them? The political climate in the US is split pretty evenly at the moment, so in your view we would have no actors or public figures expressing a political opinion. No matter what the opinion is there would be individuals, like yourself, who disagree with it and therefore the speaker should be cancelled. If everyone felt that way then nobody would be allowed to say anything because all expression would lead to cancellation. This goes completely against freedom of the individual as well as freedom of speech. It is a direct slide into authoritarianism and is diametrically opposed to liberalism. OP is correct you are not a liberal you are an authoritarian.
1. Someone loses popularity and thus their business suffers from it.
This is totally fine. I'm free not to purchase your books, music, products, services, etc. even if simply because I disagree with you on some things.
2. Someone is fired because people disagree with their ideas or thoughts.
Now this can be wrong and it can also be alright:
2.1 Someone expressed an opinion which respected other people's rights, but where a lot of people disagreed with. E.g.: I think we should invest heavily in the military to defend our borders.
In this case, this is not acceptable grounds to fire them. People have the right to hold and express their ideas freely without repercussions.
2.2 Someone expressed an opinion aimed at the destruction of other people's rights. E.g.: Black people should not be given equal treatment under the law. Women are not fit to work. White people deserve to rule over others.
In this case it is acceptable to fire them, because they attacked other people's rights, and that deserves consequences. BUT not without a fair trial. You still owe a fair trial to prove that they indeed engaged in activities aimed at the destruction of other people's rights. So in this case the person being fired should choose to sue if this happens.
> I personally believe hateful speech should have consequences, even when it isn't explicitly and immediately threatening harm on a specific individual
My problem with that is it makes large swaths of modern left politics uncriticizable, since any criticism of those politics will be construed as hate. Right wing politics were also once uncriticizable, in the "war on christmas" days, but that has since faded.
Except it doesn't, because people criticize the modern left all the time, to the point that "the left" (or now the "woke left") has become a pejorative on its own. On Hacker News dunking on the left is practically a sport. And as far as hate goes, everything "the left" says, does and believes gets construed as hate as well.
But that's not a free speech issue, that's just a speech issue. Criticizing politics is criticizing people and their identity and worldview. People will inevitably take such criticism personally.
If you agree with the ideas of liberalism, by definition that would make you a liberal, but from the way you talked about "liberals", it sounded like you excluded yourself from that group, which would mean you disagree at least partly with the ideas of liberalism.
Sorry if I was wrong, you consider yourself a liberal then?
> they should believe purely disagreeable speech should not have consequences
You have the right to be disagreeable, but others have the right to hold ideas and opinions of you and tell others about them too, unless as a direct attempt to discredit you. I think the confusion here is because the word "consequence" is too vague.
If you're a disagreeable person, and no one wants to hangout with you or be your friend anymore as a result of finding you obnoxious. Well ya that's in everyone's rights, nobody is obligated to like you.
But you have rights too, the right to dignity, a livable wage, to your reputation, etc. And so this is where there can't be consequences that would breach your own rights, which are universal to all, even obnoxious disagreeable people have them, so do gays, trans, women, blacks, asian, muslims, etc.
So what you have to do is show that your rights have been violated, and now you have a case.
If you get fired for something you are accused of which is false, I'm pretty sure you do have a case and can go to court, prove it was false and thus slender, and you'll get your job back, and penal offence can be taken to the lier.
> This should be enforced sometimes by law, and sometimes by culture, depending on the rights in play in the particular situation, as you outlined above.
Now I think you're bringing another dimension. If people don't like Joe, and they get fired on ground that he's obnoxious, despicable, repulsive, make others feel unsafe, etc. Does that go against Joe's rights?
This is a tricky one. The first issue is what do we mean by disagreeable? Because that could mean that Joe is breaching other people's rights.
Article 30 > Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein
See, Joe doesn't have the right to engage in activities aimed at the destruction of any of the other rights. And this supersedes his rights as well. So he has the right to speech, but to not speak against other people's rights.
So now if by "disagreeable", we mean that Joe is actively taking part in propagating the idea that women are not fit to work and should instead be housewives. Well based on Article 30, Joe doesn't have the right to say that and he's infringing on women's rights, and so consequences can very well apply, even losing his job.
Now if by disagreeable we mean that Joe is simply someone who is always the devil advocate, or who is ackward socially, etc. Well ya then it be a pretty big violation to fire Joe purely on those grounds.
Now also, Joe doesn't have the right to "keep his job no matter what", but he has the right "to protection against unemployment", and to "economic indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality".
So in theory, it's fine to fire Joe just because he's an asshole, but he should still be given protection against unemployment and provided with ways to have economic prosperity required to keep his dignity and develop his full personality.
So you see, you cannot discriminate against other people's rights, because others have rights that protects against discrimination, but you are allowed to discriminate against someone who is actively engaging in discrimination. This is perfectly consistent. But dont get me wrong, there should still be a fair trial, you're innocent until proven guilty, an...
Part of liberalism is accepting your own flaws and failures. Go and get another job.
To put it another way: If, in your opinion, twitter users are not subject to accountability based on the chaotic randomness of public opinion, then who are they being held accountable to? Who even determines what a "consequence" is in that scenario, or what the threshold for that bloodthirsty behavior is? Honest questions here, I really don't know what the solution is.
"The test is whether the employer’s actions, and how the employer acted, were what a fair and reasonable employer could have done in all the circumstances at the time the dismissal or action occurred."
How's that for specific and consistent! Yet it still provides protection against capricious firing.
As usual with legal stuff, the answer really seems to depends on the nature of was posted, and the employment contract that is in place.
Not really. Per your link, employees are protected in a very narrow subset of cases - where what they are doing on social media is 100% protected labour activity. But firing employees arbitrarily for social media posts (outside of those narrow protections) is completely fine. That's completely backwards from how it works in most of the developed world, where the burden of proof is on the employer who must show that the firing was for a permitted cause, rather than the employee having to show that they were fired for a non-permitted cause.
Literally everything is a consequence of something else. If you cut someone off in traffic, they might hunt you down and shoot you. That is a possible consequence. It doesn't mean it's a just or appropriate consequence or that we as a society should allow it.
It's not as bad as if this dude used a vaguely-relevant quote from, say, a serial killer, or a general convicted of massive war crimes, but it sure does make me squint at his arguments a bit harder and wonder how much he's leaving out, intentionally or because he never noticed it in the first place.
> I've struggled to understand why so many people have piled on to these absurd accusations without facts.
I watched a similar situation play out in real time. A friend had to fire an employee who wasn't submitting work or even responding to communications. The employe retaliated by using their moderately large social media presence to disparage my friend and her company.
Strangely enough, other people with zero experience in the matter were piling on to support the claims. It seemed they felt obligated to amplify and lend credence to the allegations of one of their social media friends.
The experience was extremely stressful for my friend, but ultimately the former employee cooled off and deleted many of the posts. It's hard to tell how much damage was done in the process, but I was stunned at how someone with zero evidence and an obvious axe to grind could rally such disdain for someone else with little more than a few unsubstantiated social media posts.
I feel that this is due to the weird place victimization occupies in our culture combined with how anti-social social media is.
It's extremely easy to issue accusations and threats and have them be read by literally millions of people. You would never dare vocalize these same threats and and accusations publically - and even if you did, in the pre-internet days, it would reach far far fewer people.
At some point we to start thinking about strengthening our libel laws to act as a deterrent to this type of online behaviors. It's depressing to consider MORE litigation as the solution here, but I don't think we can depend on the good nature of people and rationality to ultimately prevail.
This nearly always advantages businesses and the wealthy, especially in false or ambiguous situations, and whistleblowers of all kinds. Litigation is incredibly expensive and slow. Do people really want to spend a house worth and several years on this kind of fight?
(This is why the US felt it necessary to pass laws against UK libel judgements being enforced, it was infringing on US standards of free speech)
Any attorney will tell you - if you are going to blow the whistle on some entity that is powerful, you will lose your job, your home, your ability to work in your field, and your life will be in legal hell for decades.
And if you can't prove what you're saying is true, then why are you saying it?
"I received an anonymous harassing email" - true statement, not libel
"I received an anonymous harassing email and it was definitely from this guy" - if you can't prove it, could be libel.
See the difference?
I couldn’t imagine convincing a jury of any of these. If you make saying they happened a criminal exposure for me, I can’t warn others of the danger those people put me in, or even process my pain and grief, without fear of losing a court battle I have no chance of winning.
I’m sensitive to the damage false claims can do, but I think it’s unreasonable to say that people should be liable in a court of law to prove things that are private and unprovable. And it has a chilling effect, where people who’ve experienced similar trauma will be discouraged from sharing their experience because the risk is too high.
It’s already dangerous to accuse anyone with any kind of public presence of anything, people will defend them to the point of harassment, stalking and violence, out of pure loyalty.
Adding legal repercussions for stating that a thing happened where no one could produce conclusive evidence to confirm or deny it just means more people suffer privately without even the recourse of telling anyone what happened.
What is the alternative that you would like to see? Should we be able to destroy any person we want simply by making an accusation without evidence? Should we throw out presumption of innocence and fair trials and just chuck people in jail the moment someone accuses someone of a crime?
If someone is making a public accusation with the intent of destroying someone's livelihood and reputation, I don't think it is too much to ask that we have some way of verifying that the accusation is true.
The suggestion was to “strengthen libel laws”, presumably to reverse this.
> What is the alternative that you would like to see? Should we be able to destroy any person we want simply by making an accusation without evidence? Should we throw out presumption of innocence and fair trials and just chuck people in jail the moment someone accuses someone of a crime?
I’m actually more or less comfortable with the existing US laws. Accusing someone publicly of harming them in an unprovable way is relatively protected speech. I’m opposed to changing that to penalize people who were hurt by someone, want to disclose the fact that it happened, and couldn’t possibly survive a trial they never initiated.
> If someone is making a public accusation with the intent of destroying someone's livelihood and reputation, I don't think it is too much to ask that we have some way of verifying that the accusation is true.
That exists.
The question is what level of consequence are you saying we should inflict on people before some kind of evidence beyond an accusation is required?
If it's "I tell my friends about what happened, and then they turn down opportunities to work with that person". I don't think anyone would or could sue for libel about that. I am not proposing that they be able to. I apologize if I gave the impression that that is what I was proposing.
If it's "I make an accusation, and that person should then be unemployed and destitute and indelibly branded a sexual predator for the rest of their life" then maybe somewhere in between those two extremes, there is a point where some evidence is required, and the level of harm being done to the accused requires some stronger justification. Maybe current libel laws do not accurately delineate that point because of the advent of the Internet and the possibility for a person to experience widespread harassment based on a few claims going viral. Is that reasonable?
It’s not like this concept of “mob ruined my life” is some new concept, it’s something victims of abuse experience or withhold their stories to avoid, and have forever.
Remember when this claim was made about a now sitting SCOTUS justice? His life had been ruined? Not at all. But at least one of his accusers was so afraid for her life that she went into hiding. Imagine how much more dangerous it would be for her if she were legally penalized for “ruining his life”, which she didn’t do, but absolutely became a part of the anti-cancel-culture script. Imagine how that could be abused by someone in such a high place of power.
People who’ve been hurt by others don’t need to be legally scrutinized for saying so. If it’s in the court of public opinion, the truth comes out. We know this because the few cases where people lie are always repeated by people motivated to penalize truth telling.
I’m afraid to name people who’ve hurt me here, people no one on HN knows, because I fear retribution. Adding the possibility that I might be tangled up in years of legal battles I can’t afford simply for saying what happened is utterly terrifying to me. And that’s coming from a place of relative privilege where I don’t expect half the danger other accusers might expect.
No. There should not be legal penalties for describing abuse without legal proof.
> People who’ve been hurt by others don’t need to be legally scrutinized for saying so.
The point is that not every person who makes an accusation is someone who has been hurt by others. If there is no scrutiny allowed, how are we supposed to tell which is which? You're looking at this from the perspective of the person making the accusation, where you can know with certainty that is true. Someone on the outside doesn't have that ability.
It always matters whether an accusation is true. Penalizing accusers doesn’t produce fewer false accusations. It discourages true accusations.
> You're looking at this from the perspective of the person making the accusation, where you can know with certainty that is true. Someone on the outside doesn't have that ability.
You’ve completely misunderstood my perspective. I’m looking at it from the perspective of the person afraid to make an accusation.
I'm not sure what we gain by encouraging people to make unprovable accusations. From the outside perspective, people will be predisposed to believe one way or another, and in the absence of any evidence they'll just go to their predispositions and a lot of irrelevant argument will take place back and forth with no possible resolution, because there is no real evidence. Why is this helpful or desirable?
Why would the rate of true accusations go down while the rate of false accusations remain the same? My intuition is that they'd both go down, with false accusations decreasing more than true accusations.
Remember, indeed?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27299548
Like?
This also means, by definition, that there are no legal penalties for lying about abuse without legal proof.
If you piss off the wrong person, they can now stalk you on the Internet “warning people” about how you’re a sexual predator.
No evidence, no way to get them to stop. Better hope you don’t anger someone with a lot of followers. What a shitty world.
The parent's last paragraph seems to set up a strawman, an extreme that seems to me to covered by current libel laws. (Is it not? Explain if I'm wrong.)
It is _possible_ that current libel laws don't "accurately delineate that point", but I am looking for a stronger argument in favor of change.
Based on the posts here, I think that the role and power of "viral"-ity is not well understood. In uncertain situations I would like to seek a clearer understanding instead of simply turning to legislative solutions - surely the question that will come up is "where is the line" and if we can't say we're not ready for a law.
@eyelidlessness Thank you for a very measured set of responses; they are beyond my skill or patience.
I think there is a distinction between "say" and "publish". NAL but libel deals with published falsehoods, these are not private conversations or communications. Communicating a message to millions on twitter or saying it on TV is different from talking to friends and family.
> what I can say about people who’ve sexually assaulted me
Remember you can still relatively freely say/publish your opinion; tell a million people they are a monster, creep, treated you poorly etc. But publicly accusing someone of a specific crime or sexual-impropriety is a serious allegation, and to me it seems ok that the accused has a way to legally challenge it and require proof.
Can you not see how harmful that is?
"To prove prima facie defamation, a plaintiff must show four things:
1) a false statement purporting to be fact;
2) publication or communication of that statement to a third person;
3) fault amounting to at least negligence;
4) damages, or some harm caused to the person or entity who is the subject of the statement." https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/defamation
Maybe the real problem is firing someone from their job due to non credible accusations
Yes, Bill Cosby was sued this way. He was accused publicly, he denied the accusations & they sued him for defamation. Everything depends though, it can be harder to show a denial caused damages or is not an opinion ie; I disagree with the characterization of events.
> Maybe the real problem is firing someone from their job due to non credible accusations
Shouldn't an accusation have real potential consequences, like employment termination? In that case sue the accuser for libel.
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/03/21/394273902/...
How are you going to pay to back this up in court? Evidencing these things is tricky. As you've spotted, it doesn't matter whether what you say is true, only whether you can back it up. Oh, and you may need to lodge a bond with court in case you lose. Best re-mortgage your house.
The UK has extremely strong libel law and yet people libel each other all the time, because cases cost in excess of £100,000.
Oh, and declaring private eyewitness testimony to be worthless makes it entirely impossible to criminally prosecute rape and sexual assault.
This is not true. The unfortunate reality is that facts _don't_ matter in the realm of public opinion. They never have.
BUT, you're going to say, "I'm talking about libel, which is litigated in the court of law, not public opinion."
If that is indeed your response, I would suggest you might better familiarize yourself with the actual happenings in civil court cases. They can absolutely be just as insane, and they can absolutely act with the same lack of justice we see in other places.
I really wish most people had the type of integrity you're describing, but the uncomfortable reality is that they do not. People are going to believe the thing that makes them feel better, not the thing that is true.
I think we need to move away from the American Rule for litigation fees to the English Rule. So we incentive people for telling the truth when pursuing legal action.
least not with the current common education.
I am unconvinced that there is anything that could be done to strengthen libel laws that would have this effect short of also shutting down essential freedom of expression, given that Western regimes with stronger libel laws are not free of it, and our libel laws tend to go pretty much right up to the limit federal courts have found the First Amendment to impose on them.
Because powerful people have strong lawyers, the tools that the falsely accused can use to clear their name can be used, to more effect, by the guilty.
There are no easy solutions here. The past looked calm only because people often had no recourse unless a newspaper took up their cause.
It would reach far less people, yes, but we used to burn witches, too, so it seems that internet mobs are just a modern manifestation of that.
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2019/4/wokes-on-you
The quote works because it sounds like a large number of similar, genuine ones.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/believing-jussie-smollett-hat...
The article itself sums it up as: "Believe victims. Don’t let this story plant doubt in your mind when it’s possible that unconscious bias already lives there."
You must not apply critical thought to accusations, because, of course, you are racist/sexist/whatever and cannot be trusted to think critically.
>who haven’t been
It's clearly a parody
It’s often clear they’re just taking a birdshit on something that looks like it can earn them internet kudos.
Dynamically it doesn’t seem far removed from a lynchmob.
I'm sure it reflects their interaction in some cases, but it's so common with these witch hunts (including the one in question here), there may be more to it. Motivated reasoning or something?
Some of the more specific ones could be ex-post re-rationalizing. Like when someone discovers their neighbor was a crook, suddenly his or her demeanor in retrospect was suspicious, or had wide eyes or had eyes close together, said hi but said it fast, or never said hi, or something whatever it is that sets them apart from non crooks.
> I've struggled to understand why so many people have piled on to these absurd accusations without facts.
The same thing happened with RMS. All they could get against him were anonymous blog posts and someone vandalizing the door of his office.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dated @boop
- friends with @devonko_
- @ljmacfadyen is random twitter interaction
- dated @saskiakeultjes
stealing this for my next confrontation with the in-laws
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26612918 for the effect I'm speaking of. People will continue to distance themselves as (primarily American) society continues to be a flashpoint and Twitter a flashmob.
I just hope it's a weird early-21st century "intellectual" movement that eventually dies out.
It's just a change in who the targets are.
Until relatively recently, women and people from racial and ethnic minorities were pre-cancelled. And if they got too noisy, there was far worse on the menu---the first year in US history without a lynching was something like 1952, and that's literal torture, mutilation, and death; not having people say bad things about you on the Internet.
Was it more civil? Yeah, sure. It would only be spoken about in public rarely and the better classes of people would certainly never face it. It would certainly be more civil, as long as everyone stayed in their place.
This is like watching the evening news and deciding not to go outside ever because you are just sure you will murdered.. after all, every night they show a new murder!
I am no longer willing to mentor female coders one on one after witnessing a friend get fired from allegations from a mentally unstable female peer. She ended up getting a second dude fired, until on her third attempt the claims fell apart, and it became clear she had fabricated all 3 claims. Too late for the first two.
This victimization cult has now caused me to adopt the "billy graham rule" that I used to make fun of fundamentalist Christians about.
Go back through any of the old threads at the height of the metoo campaign. The vast majority were on the side of the mob and anyone who tried to talk sense was down-voted, flagged and accused of -isms for pointing out where this would lead.
I'd say the main point to be learned from this story is that you need to be very careful whom you consider a true friend, as opposed to just an acquaintance. Because they might not care as much about you as you care about them.
I'm not sure humanity as a whole can get away from this. Just being different is enough to trigger people's feelings of "other", to become the target of a mob fueled by hatred and fear. And everyone is capable of being different.
But, while we're not going to get away from it as a people, we can get away from it as individuals. Don't join the mobs. Don't react to the initial outrage that we feel when reading something. Sleep on it, and prefer to let the law deal with it (or work to change the laws so it can deal with it) over taking it into our own hands.
This is all under the bridge now. Since then I've had almost zero social media presence. Internet as I learned about and explored in the 90s and 00s is long gone and what's left is a wasteland to spectate.