16 ms·

Our digital pasts weren’t supposed to be weaponized like this

169 points by rutenspitz 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/KlFqg https://archive.is/KlFqg
- ksd482 5y ago
  Giving server error constantly. Perhaps it will recover. But here's an alternative: https://web.archive.org/web/20210530000441/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/29/technology/emily-wilder-firing-ap.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210530000441/https://www.nytim...
tluyben2 5y ago
This is a difficult problem to solve unless you can remove stuff about yourself from Google and other platforms. Which won't happen as that would be expensive manual work for the platforms. I cannot imagine what happens to the gigs of info young people post online (about eachother and themselves) that will be mined in 10-20 years by companies and used for evil. Since I said something in an interview to push a particular business agenda and had that used against me since then in all kinds of contexts, I make sure nothing more appears about me online. I cannot really understand how something I said or did (in this example: I was cto of a services company and in the interview I mention I like services more than products, which, at the time I did; this is no longer true) in a business setting 10 years ago is relevant to something I do now but clients and investors bring it up. Makes it kind of weird how straight up criminals get positions and investments time and time again even when they have 100s or 1000s of news articles from actual reputable press against them...
- xg15 5y ago
  Isn't this more or lesss what the EU's "right to be forgotten" initiative was about? To my knowledge, GDPR also contains legal provisions that let you enforce deletion of your data. How usable this is in practice when entire industries depend on preserving that data is another question...
- 3np 5y ago
  There actually is a process to remove yourself from Google Search results. https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/9685456?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/9685456?... https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061?...
  - codingdave 5y ago
    Those are not describing a process you can go through - they are telling you manage your robots file and handle your own content security if you own a site, or talk to the site owner if you don't own the site, and then gives very narrow conditions about removal if you cannot get the site owner to control the content.
exabrial 5y ago
The word that doesn't exist in Silicon Valley; consent.
nojs 5y ago
Wow, this is a bit rich coming from the NYT. They are among the worst offenders.
- ithkuil 5y ago
  Don't weaponize their digital past! /s
clouddrover 5y ago
This is the problem with all data collection. You can't predict who will use that data for what purpose in the future.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
> Or at the very least, why hasn’t a fear of mutually assured destruction set in? I think this is the mutually assured destruction phrase. A lot of the “cancel culture” has been deployed by the Left. The Right is now using it against people on the Left. This “cancel culture” will go away when both sides see that there is no net gain, only a grinder destroying people.
- kragen 5y ago
  MAD doesn't work when the people who get destroyed aren't the people who launched the missiles. It isn't enough for them to be other people from the same faction. When Kennedy was considering nuking Khrushchev, he had to face the reality that, if he did, his own family would die, and if he didn't, they probably wouldn't. Khrushchev, mutatis mutandis. If Kennedy had given the first-strike command, an individual colonel in a missile silo pondering whether to disobey wouldn't face a similar choice; he would know that, whatever he chose, hundreds of other colonels at other missile silos would launch their missiles, the Soviets would retaliate, and his family would die. So his only self-interest was not getting court-martialed for insubordination. The difference with cancel culture is that there is no Kennedy and no Khrushchev who has the authority to not fire the missiles. Every missile silo independently decides whether to fire and who to fire at, but they compete with other missile silos on the same side to demonstrate greater viciousness. And, instead of killing a million people, every missile kills a ten-thousandth of a person. So it's more of a grinder, as you say, than a firestorm. So, there's no net gain, but abstaining from the witch hunt is not a Nash equilibrium. It may even put you up at the stake next week when it's seen that you were insufficiently enthusiastic about today's Three Minutes Hate. More concretely, if you choose not to fire your employee because there's a social media hate campaign directed at him, whether you're right or not, that won't provide you any protection at all when it comes out that twelve years ago you posted something anti-transgender. Or pro-transgender, depending on who's canceling you. Your optimistic prediction would be true in a world where collective action was easy, and we had plenty of free software, no global warming, and no taxes, just volunteer work.
  - gus_massa 5y ago
    I mostly agree, but Kennedy and Khrushchev families probably had bunkers to survive. On the other hand, the families of the Colonels were probably living in a military facility that was a primary target of the counterstrike... Stanislav Petrov decided to ignore the official protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
plank_time 5y ago
I realized this back in 1997 when dejanews started up. From then on I never posted with my real name, and never will. I only have a very limited internet presence with my real name and never post any of my opinions on it.
- exo-pla-net 5y ago
  Caution is still advised. ML identity-matching using your writing patterns/idiosyncracies will likely be a thing in the near future.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - fuzxi 5y ago
    I'm envisioning a browser extension that runs your posts back-and-forth through Google Translate and DeepL a few times, scrubbing your post of all personal markings (and nuance).
  - david_allison 5y ago
    Stylometry is already a well-studied field, just not typically applied to online datasets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry
- spoonjim 5y ago
  Another place people never post with their real name: the voting booth. Hence the big shockers: "How did XXXX win?" It's because nobody who thought that way ever said so out loud.
Animats 5y ago
The big problem now seems to be thought policing by employers. Sometimes because they fear mobs, online or offine, coming after them. The secondary problem is being forced off social media for more or less random reasons.
- TakawaraJu 5y ago
  Is the fear really justified though? My first thought is to ignore them because they’re usually microscopic in terms of scale but I’d love to hear from someone who has had their business targeted by a mob and what effect it had on the bottom line and morale
- makomk 5y ago
  Yeah, and I suspect that often what employers really fear is that publications like the New York Times will join the pile-on and a lot of the really aggressive, fire first and ask questions later approaches are attempts to get ahead of the story before they do so that the news headlines are about an ex-employee and it's clear what their stance is.
kragen 5y ago
Ironic that this is being posted by the NYT (though not as an editorial, I guess), who fired Quinn Norton within 24 hours because she'd embedded herself in Anonymous and consequently used the word "fag", years earlier. The mob framed her as anti-gay despite her having had an outspokenly bisexual life partner around that time.
- cornel_io 5y ago
  Right, there are only three consistent positions here: 1) this type of firing is unfair and bad, 2) this type of firing is fair and good ("consequence culture"), or 3) "I'm a partisan who just wants my enemies to burn" Maybe 80% of the people that opine on this subject are in category 3), 19% are in 1), and only 1% actually believe this sort of thing is great even when it hits someone that's on their team. Unfortunately all of the category 3 hardcore partisans tell themselves that when they tear someone on the other side down it's different because they were really wrong. Here's a good test: if >50% of people on each of the left and the right would agree that someone has done something so egregious that they should face consequences, you're probably dealing with a real problem person and not a case of awry cancel culture. If more than half of either party would say that what a person has said is OK, you're probably dealing with a partisan cancellation. Edit: I should mention that I have more extreme feelings in favor of free speech than the above paragraph, in that I think even opinions that are outside the window for both parties deserve protection and shouldn't usually result in firings unless super duper out there and horrible. But my point is that at the very least, if something is a majority position in a major party, it's a mainstream position and it is extremely questionable (both morally and practically) to ever fire someone for expressing a common belief.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    > if >50% of people on each of the left and the right would agree that someone has done something so egregious that they should face consequences Is that really achievable for people who are political figures? That is, for someone attributed to a "side", is it actually possible to get the two sides to agree on anything? We've seen the defense of some quite spectacular indefensible behavior lately. Attempts to investigate The Jan 6 incident have been filibustered. There's two aspects which really ought to be separated: 1) is this behavior bad? 2) has this person done that? Much of the partisan fighting over racism and homophobia disagrees at #1. Much of the disagreement over sexual assualt happens at #2; if an event happens and only the victim witnesses it, is that sufficient proof?
mahkeiro 5y ago
What is particularly stupid is thinking that people don’t change. And that’s especially true with things posted when you are a teenager. People judging someone through a post made when they were 14-16 year old (or even 25 years ago) should be the one fired.
bumbada 5y ago
The NYT is extremely sectarian. They have been doing exactly what they now critizice for people in their right for a long time. And it is impressive what we are seeing today with corona and Wuhan lab, all those media were basically calling lunatics to those that believed in the Wuhan lab hypothesis,licking the boots of their Chinese masters, now suddenly it is ok to believe that. It is a huge problem for them, when looking back you can see clearly how much they were lying: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1396769717805780994 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1396769717805780994 Since facebook and google bankrupted press media taking their Ads money, you basically can't trust them anymore, they sell themselves to the biggest bidder.
- 0xy 5y ago
  I want to point out that Vox only labeled the edits and tweeted about it after they were caught red handed stealth editing their deception. The other "usual suspects" were all attacking lab leak theory in 2020, including CNN, Washington Post and the NYT. Washington Post's chief fact checker called it "debunked". These people are quite literally controlling the flow of information, given their secret contracts with Facebook and their influence on Twitter, YouTube and other platforms. Corporate media needs to die before they get more people killed (NYT lied about WMDs in Iraq and thousands of innocent people died, nobody was fired).
  - tobesure 5y ago
    I think the situation is far more dire. The same types of political ideologues are taking over FAANG and other tech spaces, and other information outlets, like Wikipedia, where only "approved" or "authoritative" sources are typically accepted. Corporate and social culture have been hijacked by a sort of soft, insidious, growing authoritarianism and the consequences for the future of the west are severe, especially because these newly dominant voices are increasingly openly hostile to the ≈50% of the population whom they are effectively disenfranchising. Even fundraising for controversial figures who have anything remotely in common with right of center ideology is impossible between the fundraising sites and credit card companies. Something's got to give and it won't be pretty for anyone.
spoonjim 5y ago
TROLOLOL!! The NYT has been one of the primary weaponizers of people's digital pasts for years and only now is beside itself because it happened to a fellow journalist on the "Blue Check correct" side of a hotbutton issue? Give me a break.
nicbou 5y ago
I significantly scaled back my online presence this year. I deleted accounts, scrubbed information from my public profiles, and left many communities. Despite my very bening post history, I don't feel safe participating in the discussion anymore. I don't fear being cancelled, but I am terrified of Internet lynch mobs. They know no due process, no measure, and no limits. I've dealt with a lot of direct and personal harassment after being very active in a community. I pulled the plug when someone falsely accused me of sending them creepy PMs. It was quickly debunked by stellar mods, but it made the community way too dangerous to participate in.
- tjpnz 5y ago
  I despise litigation but perhaps that's the best solution to solving this - especially when it also involves lies and blackmail. Maybe people will think twice if there are very real consequences involved.
  - nicbou 5y ago
    That's not an option with throwaway accounts
    - contriban 5y ago
      What I've been doing is stop saying anything remotely controversial or specifically related to people or society and definitely I don't interact with tweets by socially-aggressive people. For everything else, I just use throwaways. And I hate that my name is traceable back to my time in 2007 because it was so cool to use the same unique name everywhere. Nowadays Facebook, Instagram, LINE all are "serious" accounts but all have different IDs and lack my last name.
  - johnchristopher 5y ago
    The endgame will be that only rich people can afford justice once you need to finance the real consequences and the due process and everyone and every procedures involved. Really, sometimes, I believe the only winning move is not to play.
saargrin 5y ago
An organization that ran multiple exposes on people by digging thru their social media is suddenly worried about people digging thru their own past to find obviously antisemitic trash
- websites420 5y ago
  This was written by a person, not the editorial board of NYT. Could you please back your claims of antisemitism? That is a serious accusation that is unfortunately overused to apply to anyone who criticizes Israel.
captainmuon 5y ago
Instead of self censoring and deleting our past, we should solve the problem on the recipient's side, and harden ourselves against this kind of attack. When someone is booted out of office for the wrong reasons (even though it is "the right person", i.e. someone who's views I don't agree with) I speak out against it. If I was a politician, I would pledge before elections to never step down due to anything that happend in my past; if I had a company I would consider adding something into contracts that we cannot fire people due to past controversial statements. I think we have a unified legal system for a reason, and would prefer if everything prohibited is handled there, after which you are considered innocent again. I don't like cases where someone is legally innocent but yeah he's an asshole and we don't give him a job anymore. You could argue different people have different standards, and it is a free market and people are allowed to choose who they work with and who they deplatform - but in practice, at least in the entertainment industry, the standards are rather monolithic. Companies don't want to offend anyone, and also don't want to get trouble with payment providers, so you get certain behavior. Don't kid yourself, the liberal Twitter bubble doesn't have the kind of power to "cancel" people on their own - big corporations and media companies decide what get's picked up, what get's scandalized, and what is acceptable. And I'd really rather have this decided democratically by some kind of parliament or council than by some companies.
- jsiepkes 5y ago
  > if I had a company I would consider adding something into contracts that we cannot fire people due to past controversial statements. It's not that people think you need to pay for your past "transgressions" (in their eyes). The problem is that people think they can extrapolate your future decisions, behavior, etc. based on a snippet from your past. So it's not really about something that happened in the past. It's about something that people will think will happen in the future.
  - topspin 5y ago
    > The problem is that people think they can extrapolate your future decisions People aren't that noble. You excuse what is callous brutalism as well intentioned error. People aren't guarding against dangerous influences. They're abusing mob power.
cesarvarela 5y ago
This topic always reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C31XYgr8gp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C31XYgr8gp0
cik 5y ago
The lack of nuance on this issue, in society is shocking. We expect people to change and grow over time. People change opinions, political parties, perhaps even ideals, yet we crucify people in the public domain for opinions they once opined, and possibly still hold. At best this discourages dialogue. It discourages people from interacting in the public domain, vilifies their non-work lives, and unifies them in terrifying ways. Actions have consequences, and (from outside North America) it appears that the goal is to polarize society and then prosecute in the court of public opinion.
- emerged 5y ago
  I’ve noticed society also tends to be surprisingly supportive of people who were once drug addicts, even in spite of any crimes they committed during that time. It’s recognized the effort it takes to change and sometimes evens seems to be perceived as making you a better or more impressive person than someone who never took drugs in the first place. Maybe these things have to become so prolific that it touches a critical mass of society until we learn how to properly conceptualize people with a past and provide for a path of redemption.
  - cik 5y ago
    Does the question not become redemption from what? There are individuals who support X or support Y - but in the modern era to some group of people support for either of those letters is abhorrent. Today people are 'cancelled' for holding certain political views. Perhaps in the future they're cancelled for having eaten meat, or spending money in a communist country. What about holding stock in Nestle, or perhaps at one point in time supporting a (now disgraced) cleric. The nuance is rather important - the world is neither black, nor white.
mdoms 5y ago
Rich, coming from NY Times.
sebow 5y ago
Coming from NYT or any other MSM outlet... ironic much? The media has always been the source of weaponizing people's past, today with even less regard to their current status or any other factor.
comodore_ 5y ago
Are the journos finally feeling the heat themselves? journos are one of the worst offenders in this toxic climate. Weaponizing tweets only loses its power in only two ways, either by every reasonable person and institution realizing that this is stupid, or by mutual assured destruction. Unfortunately I think we're well past the point of no return, so I'm looking forward to the latter. So let the cancelations continue until moral improves.
secondcoming 5y ago
Twitter: a place where anything you say can, and will, be held against you in the court of public opinion _forever_. All for internet points.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  If ever there was a better example of why the internet needs anonymity, I can’t think of it.
JackMorgan 5y ago
In the future I suspect cancelling will be illegal: the same way vigilante justice is illegal now. Causing a person to be fired/doxxed by a mob for an action that isn't even illegal (free speach) is no more morally noble then going and beating them up over a suspected crime. If a person commits a crime, then let courts decide, otherwise it's just mob rule and vigilante "justice". That said, I think it's going to take at least a few more decades before such a ruling is made. I suspect it will come along the lines that internet history is protected speech, and so it's a protected work category and is illegal to fire a person over. Once companies can just point to the law and shrug, then they can ignore the online mob. Additionally, one would think cancelling should fall under libel and slander laws, and the accused would be able to go after the instigators. It's uncomfortable when it's "your side" that finds it's goals at odds with human rights, but in the end we're all better off with defending basic human rights. Policing morality is infinitely more difficult and oppressive, no matter how much it really feels good at the moment.
- blablabla123 5y ago
  > In the future I suspect cancelling will be illegal: Which actions exactly should be illegal? I assume you don't want to make me force watching movies from certain producers that I don't like anymore. At the same time in some countries retail stores basically have to cater to everyone and already can be made liable if they don't sell something that they advertised for as long as customers stick to terms and conditions. I rather think that excess cancelling and all that comes with it is a result of perceived injustices. Even if you come up with a very creative law unless these injustices are solved the symptoms will pop up elsewhere. That said, standards in society develop over time and probably the capacity for ambivalence is going to rise again. Also people tend to give more credit to things that have been worked for more than things that have been inherited.
  - AstralStorm 5y ago
    Political speech, in particular, is supposed to be protected from this kind of treatment. Most importantly, accusations of bias are also not a valid reason to fire a journalist. There's also an intermingling of private and public sphere, and firing someone for private legal behavior because some internet hive mind started a smear campaign also should not be lawful. Of course, America has the coercive institution of at-will employment, ruining any attempt at fixing it this way. A good step would be filling class action defamation suit against a class running a smear campaign over barely public and irrelevant things. Consequences for setting up mobs. While platform is not liable, the users are. That could make some people think twice before doing it.
texaswhizzle 5y ago
Stop posting your life and thoughts on the internet! Privacy advocates have been screaming about this for years but no one seems to care until they have a gun in their face. The really sad thing is the children. Parents uploading their kids entire lives and the kids have absolutely no way to opt out. Permanently giving your kid an online identity before they can even talk. Horrible thing to do to your child.
emptyparadise 5y ago
Don't you miss anonymity online?
- h0p3 5y ago
  Anonymity comes in degrees and kinds, and, alongside radical decentralization, it can improve our ability to solve some problems of justice for which there are no other solutions. However, there are limits to what it buys us, and huge costs, too. I hold anonymous giving and anonymized trust in high regard, nomad. Quite fallibly, I put my skin in the game on the wire like few ever have. I hope we learn to wear the Ring of Gyges without being unduly affected by it. Let us be the change we want to see in the world (https://philosopher.life/#Contact%20h0p3 https://philosopher.life/#Contact%20h0p3). Some say I'm a madman out here in the desert. It's a pleasure to meet you.
upofadown 5y ago
I think the root problem here is that some employers think that social media mobs somehow represent public opinion. They do in a trivial sense, but in the vast majority of cases just ignoring the whole thing is a reasonable course of action. There has to be more accountability here. It should be possible for a potential employee to see a company's past actions with respect to this sort of thing. In general a potential employee should know going in that an employer is so unprofessional that they might throw them under the bus for something as trivial as social media.
shadowgovt 5y ago
They mention Eric Schmidt's thoughts on the topic from 11 years ago in the article. Schmidt had a habit as Google CEO of saying true things in the least palatable way. That was the same interview where he said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." People interpreted it as a flippant dismissal of privacy, but what he was trying to express was this era was coming... The modern web was going to make hiding one's past behavior extremely difficult.
throwaway512793 5y ago
I recently went on trying to delete my old Facebook posts and the amount of hurdles and steps necessary and errors involved leads to the thought that without doubt Facebook does not want you to do this. In order to delete the posts you have to manually click on each and every one and then click on delete. Sometimes it throws an “unexpected error” and then you have to click on everything again, but then it often throws the error again. Another way is to “mark all” but that only marks 50 posts at once. If you scroll down then it adds another 50 posts, at the cost of about 20 seconds per scroll, so when you scroll down far enough you can accumulate a lot of posts that will be available for “mark all”. But, mind that Facebook doesn’t like you to batch remove all of your history. So after 150 or 200 posts (the amount is changing apparently randomly) accumulated and clicking on delete, they throw a “Challenge required” error. With trial and error you find out that this error appears always after you accumulated too much, so you’d naturally think, let me just go back one step and scroll a couple of time less to generate a new and smaller list. But it’s not possible to generate that list of posts again for some reason, as going away from the activity monitor and back into it again just shows again the >200 posts list nicely prefetched for you. I found the only way to “reset” this view is to log out of Facebook and log in back again, then the activity monitor starts at 50 posts again. Hopefully when you then batch delete 150-200 posts, there isn’t a special post in between which brings another error when trying to delete from the activity monitor in batch or manual. It seems that this error only appears when you deleted too many posts in a specific time frame. What you need to do is to find that post in the haystack of at minimum 50 posts, click on it’s time such that you get on the posts individual page (better open in another tab or you might get insane eventually, if not already) and then delete the post from there by using the menu button. Hopefully it allows you to delete and you can continue to batch delete the rest in batches of 150-200. Otherwise you will have to wait for a couple of hours you receive a new delete allowance. Lastly, even if you at first think posts were deleted, you might have to revisit and see again, as some posts just reappear again. You don’t find them necessarily inside the activity monitor again but e.g. when you use the search, or even worse, when others use the search on these posts.
- aboringusername 5y ago
  It's a disgrace the GDPR has not made it easier to delete content as easy as it is to generate it. I also think hackernews is a disgrace too, as you cannot edit nor delete your posts here and dang should immediately fix this (or whomevers responsible) If I want to delete every piece of data from a companies storage (including backups, caches et al) I should be able to do that. If it is ever proven that data still exists on an individual whose requested full deletion the CEO should be imprisoned for a minimum of one year. But of course that will never happen and the GDPR is an absolute failure that has done more harm than good.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
I remember when a Brazilian teenager was killed after a stranger in front of him at a concert turned around suddenly and pointed at him saying he stole her phone. Before he knew what happened, he was stabbed to death by a mob while the real thief got away. Vigilante ’justice’ continues to be a scourge of society; think of the stoning episodes of millenniums past. Social media removes the activation energy barrier to be a part of a mob - to feel the thrill.
scrps 5y ago
In a weird way I think cancel culture/doxxing/call out culture has given a massive boost to privacy awareness at least for people who aren't in highly visible jobs. Over the past couple of years but especially 2020 I've had more non-tech family members, friends and friends of friends ask me for advice on preserving their privacy and anonymity and political speech seems to usually be in the top 5 reasons when I ask them.
Zealotux 5y ago
"We must become the pitiless censors of ourselves." – Alain Badiou
RONROC 5y ago
Probably an unpopular take but cancelling typically occurs in domains that either deserve the maximum amount of public scrutiny such as politics and show business (the reasoning here is that the people who operate in these domains have, always will, and should be held to account for the simple reason that they wouldn’t be in these positions without the inverse, ie. positive public perception—-if you’re not useful, you’re replaceable) or in industries that have a inherently corrosive framework whose success is predicated on extracting a disproportionate amount of value from the those who are doing the cancelling such as big tech and media (no normal person will weep for these people and with good reason). The only exception here is the cancelling of people with relatively small followings/influence who receive heavy-handed negative attention (like the Reddit bomber or people in academia like the N-word professor) but instances like these are fewer and far between and will probably decline over time as boomers leave the discourse (die). I used to work at a few big media companies in a position that required a decent amount of public facing and had brushes with this sort of behavior in the past (people tweeting death threats at me, which I just brushed off because I understood what I signed up for and am not naive). These days I work for myself in a “blue collar” industry and mostly ignore social media, so I can’t really be cancelled. I guess the point i’m trying to make is, if this is something you’re actually worried about, just 1; go work in an industry that lacks the highly educated, overstimulated, and mostly out of touch people that dominate 99% of the discourse but speak for 1% of the population 2; learn how to read the room (ie. listen more and talk less) Big tech wanted everyone to have a voice and now they do. :)
rdiddly 5y ago
The Times has become one of the biggest online bullies. To be consistent the author would have to quit working there. Consider this article therapy, part of her process of working it out.
mlloyd 5y ago
A couple of things that I've learned about the country as I've watched the Cancel culture war: 1)Many believe having freedom of speech means having freedom from consequences of your speech. And not just governmental consequence but all consequence. That's wrong and always has been wrong, if rarely enforced. Speech has always had consequences but those consequences weren't cancellation. Not for white folks anyway. 2)White people can't live in the same world with the same rules that they've created for other people. Cancel culture is very much a thing and has been a thing used against Black folks and other minorities in America for decades. The list of things we get canceled for far exceeds exercising our freedom of speech. Here's a short list: A)Our names. Got an ethnic name? Expect to get less interview callbacks. B)Hair. We've had to lobby for laws to protect our right to wear our hair in 'natural' or 'ethnic' styles. C)Actual Freedom of Speech. Try and bring up racism or discrimination practically anywhere and see what happens to you. See Colin Kaepernick. D)Skin Complexion. Light-skinned privilege is a thing. Google 'colorism'. E)Accent and use of language. Google 'code switching'. You get the point. If the only thing you have to worry about is if you actually said something dumb in your past and if it's going to come up, then you have it good. Other folks are getting canceled just how they exist, from traits they can't change, and they have been for decades. And even with all that, I still think Cancel culture is pretty shit because the mob is a broadsword, not a scalpel - h/t "The Siege". It doesn't stop at Trump, it keeps going to folks like AGM. But I'd love it if those fighting against cancel culture also fight for those who aren't white men complaining about it on Twitter and Hacker News. Fight also for those who have been victimized by cancel culture before it had a catchy name and impacted the white and powerful. Probably won't win until you do anyway.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fitzie 5y ago
we have weaponized outrage against our neighbors and it is absurd. weve gotten to the point where a hangman's noose is racist as is the OK hand sign, and it is now common for such simple displays to escalate to a federal case. we want kids to stop bullying each other in school, but ridicule, harassment, name calling, and ostracization are perfectly acceptable ways to settle disputes. if this is to change, we will have to tone it down, not pretend that someone is evil because of a single harmless thing that they said, and business leaders will have to steer their companies away from encouraging this childish outrage culture.
ergot_vacation 5y ago
There are pages of comments here now debating all the intricacies of this situation: Where free speech begins and ends, when firing is justified or not, how and if it's possible to solve the issue with the courts or congress. The cold reality is that the solution to all of this is very simple: 1. Stop using your real name (and personal information) online. 2. Stop using social media sites (as they revolve around sharing personal information). In situations when you MUST use real life identity online, only post the most bland, inoffensive things possible. The multitude of protests to this position are irrelevant: anonymity online is not an option, it is a NECESSITY because of the way the Internet works. Clever people understood this from the beginning: this advice was mainstream Internet 101 in the 90s. But as time went on profit seeking companies brainwashed everyone into a new norm where we all go around with our clothes off and our dicks out. This is not a safe or sustainable situation. The net isn't like real life. It has MEMORY, vast and sticky. It's searchable. On the net, information is a weapon, and if you go around handing out loaded weapons to everyone you meet, eventually bad things will happen. Reams of digital ink have been spilled in this comment section debating how best to keep people from firing the weapon at you. This misses the point. Stop giving it to them in the first place. If you do, you have no room to complain.
happynacho 5y ago
Ironic

169 points by rutenspitz 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.is/KlFqg https://archive.is/KlFqg

ksd482 5y ago
Giving server error constantly. Perhaps it will recover. But here's an alternative: https://web.archive.org/web/20210530000441/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/29/technology/emily-wilder-firing-ap.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210530000441/https://www.nytim...

tluyben2 5y ago

This is a difficult problem to solve unless you can remove stuff about yourself from Google and other platforms. Which won't happen as that would be expensive manual work for the platforms. I cannot imagine what happens to the gigs of info young people post online (about eachother and themselves) that will be mined in 10-20 years by companies and used for evil. Since I said something in an interview to push a particular business agenda and had that used against me since then in all kinds of contexts, I make sure nothing more appears about me online. I cannot really understand how something I said or did (in this example: I was cto of a services company and in the interview I mention I like services more than products, which, at the time I did; this is no longer true) in a business setting 10 years ago is relevant to something I do now but clients and investors bring it up. Makes it kind of weird how straight up criminals get positions and investments time and time again even when they have 100s or 1000s of news articles from actual reputable press against them...

xg15 5y ago
Isn't this more or lesss what the EU's "right to be forgotten" initiative was about? To my knowledge, GDPR also contains legal provisions that let you enforce deletion of your data. How usable this is in practice when entire industries depend on preserving that data is another question...
3np 5y ago
There actually is a process to remove yourself from Google Search results. https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/9685456?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/9685456?... https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061?...
- codingdave 5y ago
  Those are not describing a process you can go through - they are telling you manage your robots file and handle your own content security if you own a site, or talk to the site owner if you don't own the site, and then gives very narrow conditions about removal if you cannot get the site owner to control the content.

exabrial 5y ago

The word that doesn't exist in Silicon Valley; consent.

nojs 5y ago

Wow, this is a bit rich coming from the NYT. They are among the worst offenders.

ithkuil 5y ago
Don't weaponize their digital past! /s

clouddrover 5y ago

This is the problem with all data collection. You can't predict who will use that data for what purpose in the future.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

> Or at the very least, why hasn’t a fear of mutually assured destruction set in? I think this is the mutually assured destruction phrase. A lot of the “cancel culture” has been deployed by the Left. The Right is now using it against people on the Left. This “cancel culture” will go away when both sides see that there is no net gain, only a grinder destroying people.

kragen 5y ago
MAD doesn't work when the people who get destroyed aren't the people who launched the missiles. It isn't enough for them to be other people from the same faction. When Kennedy was considering nuking Khrushchev, he had to face the reality that, if he did, his own family would die, and if he didn't, they probably wouldn't. Khrushchev, mutatis mutandis. If Kennedy had given the first-strike command, an individual colonel in a missile silo pondering whether to disobey wouldn't face a similar choice; he would know that, whatever he chose, hundreds of other colonels at other missile silos would launch their missiles, the Soviets would retaliate, and his family would die. So his only self-interest was not getting court-martialed for insubordination. The difference with cancel culture is that there is no Kennedy and no Khrushchev who has the authority to not fire the missiles. Every missile silo independently decides whether to fire and who to fire at, but they compete with other missile silos on the same side to demonstrate greater viciousness. And, instead of killing a million people, every missile kills a ten-thousandth of a person. So it's more of a grinder, as you say, than a firestorm. So, there's no net gain, but abstaining from the witch hunt is not a Nash equilibrium. It may even put you up at the stake next week when it's seen that you were insufficiently enthusiastic about today's Three Minutes Hate. More concretely, if you choose not to fire your employee because there's a social media hate campaign directed at him, whether you're right or not, that won't provide you any protection at all when it comes out that twelve years ago you posted something anti-transgender. Or pro-transgender, depending on who's canceling you. Your optimistic prediction would be true in a world where collective action was easy, and we had plenty of free software, no global warming, and no taxes, just volunteer work.
- gus_massa 5y ago
  I mostly agree, but Kennedy and Khrushchev families probably had bunkers to survive. On the other hand, the families of the Colonels were probably living in a military facility that was a primary target of the counterstrike... Stanislav Petrov decided to ignore the official protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

plank_time 5y ago

I realized this back in 1997 when dejanews started up. From then on I never posted with my real name, and never will. I only have a very limited internet presence with my real name and never post any of my opinions on it.

exo-pla-net 5y ago
Caution is still advised. ML identity-matching using your writing patterns/idiosyncracies will likely be a thing in the near future.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- fuzxi 5y ago
  I'm envisioning a browser extension that runs your posts back-and-forth through Google Translate and DeepL a few times, scrubbing your post of all personal markings (and nuance).
- david_allison 5y ago
  Stylometry is already a well-studied field, just not typically applied to online datasets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry
spoonjim 5y ago
Another place people never post with their real name: the voting booth. Hence the big shockers: "How did XXXX win?" It's because nobody who thought that way ever said so out loud.

Animats 5y ago

The big problem now seems to be thought policing by employers. Sometimes because they fear mobs, online or offine, coming after them. The secondary problem is being forced off social media for more or less random reasons.

TakawaraJu 5y ago
Is the fear really justified though? My first thought is to ignore them because they’re usually microscopic in terms of scale but I’d love to hear from someone who has had their business targeted by a mob and what effect it had on the bottom line and morale
makomk 5y ago
Yeah, and I suspect that often what employers really fear is that publications like the New York Times will join the pile-on and a lot of the really aggressive, fire first and ask questions later approaches are attempts to get ahead of the story before they do so that the news headlines are about an ex-employee and it's clear what their stance is.

kragen 5y ago

Ironic that this is being posted by the NYT (though not as an editorial, I guess), who fired Quinn Norton within 24 hours because she'd embedded herself in Anonymous and consequently used the word "fag", years earlier. The mob framed her as anti-gay despite her having had an outspokenly bisexual life partner around that time.

cornel_io 5y ago
Right, there are only three consistent positions here: 1) this type of firing is unfair and bad, 2) this type of firing is fair and good ("consequence culture"), or 3) "I'm a partisan who just wants my enemies to burn" Maybe 80% of the people that opine on this subject are in category 3), 19% are in 1), and only 1% actually believe this sort of thing is great even when it hits someone that's on their team. Unfortunately all of the category 3 hardcore partisans tell themselves that when they tear someone on the other side down it's different because they were really wrong. Here's a good test: if >50% of people on each of the left and the right would agree that someone has done something so egregious that they should face consequences, you're probably dealing with a real problem person and not a case of awry cancel culture. If more than half of either party would say that what a person has said is OK, you're probably dealing with a partisan cancellation. Edit: I should mention that I have more extreme feelings in favor of free speech than the above paragraph, in that I think even opinions that are outside the window for both parties deserve protection and shouldn't usually result in firings unless super duper out there and horrible. But my point is that at the very least, if something is a majority position in a major party, it's a mainstream position and it is extremely questionable (both morally and practically) to ever fire someone for expressing a common belief.
- pjc50 5y ago
  > if >50% of people on each of the left and the right would agree that someone has done something so egregious that they should face consequences Is that really achievable for people who are political figures? That is, for someone attributed to a "side", is it actually possible to get the two sides to agree on anything? We've seen the defense of some quite spectacular indefensible behavior lately. Attempts to investigate The Jan 6 incident have been filibustered. There's two aspects which really ought to be separated: 1) is this behavior bad? 2) has this person done that? Much of the partisan fighting over racism and homophobia disagrees at #1. Much of the disagreement over sexual assualt happens at #2; if an event happens and only the victim witnesses it, is that sufficient proof?

mahkeiro 5y ago

What is particularly stupid is thinking that people don’t change. And that’s especially true with things posted when you are a teenager. People judging someone through a post made when they were 14-16 year old (or even 25 years ago) should be the one fired.

bumbada 5y ago

The NYT is extremely sectarian. They have been doing exactly what they now critizice for people in their right for a long time. And it is impressive what we are seeing today with corona and Wuhan lab, all those media were basically calling lunatics to those that believed in the Wuhan lab hypothesis,licking the boots of their Chinese masters, now suddenly it is ok to believe that. It is a huge problem for them, when looking back you can see clearly how much they were lying: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1396769717805780994 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1396769717805780994 Since facebook and google bankrupted press media taking their Ads money, you basically can't trust them anymore, they sell themselves to the biggest bidder.

0xy 5y ago
I want to point out that Vox only labeled the edits and tweeted about it after they were caught red handed stealth editing their deception. The other "usual suspects" were all attacking lab leak theory in 2020, including CNN, Washington Post and the NYT. Washington Post's chief fact checker called it "debunked". These people are quite literally controlling the flow of information, given their secret contracts with Facebook and their influence on Twitter, YouTube and other platforms. Corporate media needs to die before they get more people killed (NYT lied about WMDs in Iraq and thousands of innocent people died, nobody was fired).
- tobesure 5y ago
  I think the situation is far more dire. The same types of political ideologues are taking over FAANG and other tech spaces, and other information outlets, like Wikipedia, where only "approved" or "authoritative" sources are typically accepted. Corporate and social culture have been hijacked by a sort of soft, insidious, growing authoritarianism and the consequences for the future of the west are severe, especially because these newly dominant voices are increasingly openly hostile to the ≈50% of the population whom they are effectively disenfranchising. Even fundraising for controversial figures who have anything remotely in common with right of center ideology is impossible between the fundraising sites and credit card companies. Something's got to give and it won't be pretty for anyone.

spoonjim 5y ago

TROLOLOL!! The NYT has been one of the primary weaponizers of people's digital pasts for years and only now is beside itself because it happened to a fellow journalist on the "Blue Check correct" side of a hotbutton issue? Give me a break.

nicbou 5y ago

I significantly scaled back my online presence this year. I deleted accounts, scrubbed information from my public profiles, and left many communities. Despite my very bening post history, I don't feel safe participating in the discussion anymore. I don't fear being cancelled, but I am terrified of Internet lynch mobs. They know no due process, no measure, and no limits. I've dealt with a lot of direct and personal harassment after being very active in a community. I pulled the plug when someone falsely accused me of sending them creepy PMs. It was quickly debunked by stellar mods, but it made the community way too dangerous to participate in.

tjpnz 5y ago
I despise litigation but perhaps that's the best solution to solving this - especially when it also involves lies and blackmail. Maybe people will think twice if there are very real consequences involved.
- nicbou 5y ago
  That's not an option with throwaway accounts
  - contriban 5y ago
    What I've been doing is stop saying anything remotely controversial or specifically related to people or society and definitely I don't interact with tweets by socially-aggressive people. For everything else, I just use throwaways. And I hate that my name is traceable back to my time in 2007 because it was so cool to use the same unique name everywhere. Nowadays Facebook, Instagram, LINE all are "serious" accounts but all have different IDs and lack my last name.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  The endgame will be that only rich people can afford justice once you need to finance the real consequences and the due process and everyone and every procedures involved. Really, sometimes, I believe the only winning move is not to play.

saargrin 5y ago

An organization that ran multiple exposes on people by digging thru their social media is suddenly worried about people digging thru their own past to find obviously antisemitic trash

websites420 5y ago
This was written by a person, not the editorial board of NYT. Could you please back your claims of antisemitism? That is a serious accusation that is unfortunately overused to apply to anyone who criticizes Israel.

captainmuon 5y ago

Instead of self censoring and deleting our past, we should solve the problem on the recipient's side, and harden ourselves against this kind of attack. When someone is booted out of office for the wrong reasons (even though it is "the right person", i.e. someone who's views I don't agree with) I speak out against it. If I was a politician, I would pledge before elections to never step down due to anything that happend in my past; if I had a company I would consider adding something into contracts that we cannot fire people due to past controversial statements. I think we have a unified legal system for a reason, and would prefer if everything prohibited is handled there, after which you are considered innocent again. I don't like cases where someone is legally innocent but yeah he's an asshole and we don't give him a job anymore. You could argue different people have different standards, and it is a free market and people are allowed to choose who they work with and who they deplatform - but in practice, at least in the entertainment industry, the standards are rather monolithic. Companies don't want to offend anyone, and also don't want to get trouble with payment providers, so you get certain behavior. Don't kid yourself, the liberal Twitter bubble doesn't have the kind of power to "cancel" people on their own - big corporations and media companies decide what get's picked up, what get's scandalized, and what is acceptable. And I'd really rather have this decided democratically by some kind of parliament or council than by some companies.

jsiepkes 5y ago
> if I had a company I would consider adding something into contracts that we cannot fire people due to past controversial statements. It's not that people think you need to pay for your past "transgressions" (in their eyes). The problem is that people think they can extrapolate your future decisions, behavior, etc. based on a snippet from your past. So it's not really about something that happened in the past. It's about something that people will think will happen in the future.
- topspin 5y ago
  > The problem is that people think they can extrapolate your future decisions People aren't that noble. You excuse what is callous brutalism as well intentioned error. People aren't guarding against dangerous influences. They're abusing mob power.

cesarvarela 5y ago

This topic always reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C31XYgr8gp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C31XYgr8gp0

cik 5y ago

The lack of nuance on this issue, in society is shocking. We expect people to change and grow over time. People change opinions, political parties, perhaps even ideals, yet we crucify people in the public domain for opinions they once opined, and possibly still hold. At best this discourages dialogue. It discourages people from interacting in the public domain, vilifies their non-work lives, and unifies them in terrifying ways. Actions have consequences, and (from outside North America) it appears that the goal is to polarize society and then prosecute in the court of public opinion.

emerged 5y ago
I’ve noticed society also tends to be surprisingly supportive of people who were once drug addicts, even in spite of any crimes they committed during that time. It’s recognized the effort it takes to change and sometimes evens seems to be perceived as making you a better or more impressive person than someone who never took drugs in the first place. Maybe these things have to become so prolific that it touches a critical mass of society until we learn how to properly conceptualize people with a past and provide for a path of redemption.
- cik 5y ago
  Does the question not become redemption from what? There are individuals who support X or support Y - but in the modern era to some group of people support for either of those letters is abhorrent. Today people are 'cancelled' for holding certain political views. Perhaps in the future they're cancelled for having eaten meat, or spending money in a communist country. What about holding stock in Nestle, or perhaps at one point in time supporting a (now disgraced) cleric. The nuance is rather important - the world is neither black, nor white.

mdoms 5y ago

Rich, coming from NY Times.

sebow 5y ago

Coming from NYT or any other MSM outlet... ironic much? The media has always been the source of weaponizing people's past, today with even less regard to their current status or any other factor.

comodore_ 5y ago

Are the journos finally feeling the heat themselves? journos are one of the worst offenders in this toxic climate. Weaponizing tweets only loses its power in only two ways, either by every reasonable person and institution realizing that this is stupid, or by mutual assured destruction. Unfortunately I think we're well past the point of no return, so I'm looking forward to the latter. So let the cancelations continue until moral improves.

secondcoming 5y ago

Twitter: a place where anything you say can, and will, be held against you in the court of public opinion _forever_. All for internet points.

commandlinefan 5y ago
If ever there was a better example of why the internet needs anonymity, I can’t think of it.

JackMorgan 5y ago

In the future I suspect cancelling will be illegal: the same way vigilante justice is illegal now. Causing a person to be fired/doxxed by a mob for an action that isn't even illegal (free speach) is no more morally noble then going and beating them up over a suspected crime. If a person commits a crime, then let courts decide, otherwise it's just mob rule and vigilante "justice". That said, I think it's going to take at least a few more decades before such a ruling is made. I suspect it will come along the lines that internet history is protected speech, and so it's a protected work category and is illegal to fire a person over. Once companies can just point to the law and shrug, then they can ignore the online mob. Additionally, one would think cancelling should fall under libel and slander laws, and the accused would be able to go after the instigators. It's uncomfortable when it's "your side" that finds it's goals at odds with human rights, but in the end we're all better off with defending basic human rights. Policing morality is infinitely more difficult and oppressive, no matter how much it really feels good at the moment.

blablabla123 5y ago
> In the future I suspect cancelling will be illegal: Which actions exactly should be illegal? I assume you don't want to make me force watching movies from certain producers that I don't like anymore. At the same time in some countries retail stores basically have to cater to everyone and already can be made liable if they don't sell something that they advertised for as long as customers stick to terms and conditions. I rather think that excess cancelling and all that comes with it is a result of perceived injustices. Even if you come up with a very creative law unless these injustices are solved the symptoms will pop up elsewhere. That said, standards in society develop over time and probably the capacity for ambivalence is going to rise again. Also people tend to give more credit to things that have been worked for more than things that have been inherited.
- AstralStorm 5y ago
  Political speech, in particular, is supposed to be protected from this kind of treatment. Most importantly, accusations of bias are also not a valid reason to fire a journalist. There's also an intermingling of private and public sphere, and firing someone for private legal behavior because some internet hive mind started a smear campaign also should not be lawful. Of course, America has the coercive institution of at-will employment, ruining any attempt at fixing it this way. A good step would be filling class action defamation suit against a class running a smear campaign over barely public and irrelevant things. Consequences for setting up mobs. While platform is not liable, the users are. That could make some people think twice before doing it.

texaswhizzle 5y ago

Stop posting your life and thoughts on the internet! Privacy advocates have been screaming about this for years but no one seems to care until they have a gun in their face. The really sad thing is the children. Parents uploading their kids entire lives and the kids have absolutely no way to opt out. Permanently giving your kid an online identity before they can even talk. Horrible thing to do to your child.

emptyparadise 5y ago

Don't you miss anonymity online?

h0p3 5y ago
Anonymity comes in degrees and kinds, and, alongside radical decentralization, it can improve our ability to solve some problems of justice for which there are no other solutions. However, there are limits to what it buys us, and huge costs, too. I hold anonymous giving and anonymized trust in high regard, nomad. Quite fallibly, I put my skin in the game on the wire like few ever have. I hope we learn to wear the Ring of Gyges without being unduly affected by it. Let us be the change we want to see in the world (https://philosopher.life/#Contact%20h0p3 https://philosopher.life/#Contact%20h0p3). Some say I'm a madman out here in the desert. It's a pleasure to meet you.

upofadown 5y ago

I think the root problem here is that some employers think that social media mobs somehow represent public opinion. They do in a trivial sense, but in the vast majority of cases just ignoring the whole thing is a reasonable course of action. There has to be more accountability here. It should be possible for a potential employee to see a company's past actions with respect to this sort of thing. In general a potential employee should know going in that an employer is so unprofessional that they might throw them under the bus for something as trivial as social media.

shadowgovt 5y ago

They mention Eric Schmidt's thoughts on the topic from 11 years ago in the article. Schmidt had a habit as Google CEO of saying true things in the least palatable way. That was the same interview where he said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." People interpreted it as a flippant dismissal of privacy, but what he was trying to express was this era was coming... The modern web was going to make hiding one's past behavior extremely difficult.

throwaway512793 5y ago

I recently went on trying to delete my old Facebook posts and the amount of hurdles and steps necessary and errors involved leads to the thought that without doubt Facebook does not want you to do this. In order to delete the posts you have to manually click on each and every one and then click on delete. Sometimes it throws an “unexpected error” and then you have to click on everything again, but then it often throws the error again. Another way is to “mark all” but that only marks 50 posts at once. If you scroll down then it adds another 50 posts, at the cost of about 20 seconds per scroll, so when you scroll down far enough you can accumulate a lot of posts that will be available for “mark all”. But, mind that Facebook doesn’t like you to batch remove all of your history. So after 150 or 200 posts (the amount is changing apparently randomly) accumulated and clicking on delete, they throw a “Challenge required” error. With trial and error you find out that this error appears always after you accumulated too much, so you’d naturally think, let me just go back one step and scroll a couple of time less to generate a new and smaller list. But it’s not possible to generate that list of posts again for some reason, as going away from the activity monitor and back into it again just shows again the >200 posts list nicely prefetched for you. I found the only way to “reset” this view is to log out of Facebook and log in back again, then the activity monitor starts at 50 posts again. Hopefully when you then batch delete 150-200 posts, there isn’t a special post in between which brings another error when trying to delete from the activity monitor in batch or manual. It seems that this error only appears when you deleted too many posts in a specific time frame. What you need to do is to find that post in the haystack of at minimum 50 posts, click on it’s time such that you get on the posts individual page (better open in another tab or you might get insane eventually, if not already) and then delete the post from there by using the menu button. Hopefully it allows you to delete and you can continue to batch delete the rest in batches of 150-200. Otherwise you will have to wait for a couple of hours you receive a new delete allowance. Lastly, even if you at first think posts were deleted, you might have to revisit and see again, as some posts just reappear again. You don’t find them necessarily inside the activity monitor again but e.g. when you use the search, or even worse, when others use the search on these posts.

aboringusername 5y ago
It's a disgrace the GDPR has not made it easier to delete content as easy as it is to generate it. I also think hackernews is a disgrace too, as you cannot edit nor delete your posts here and dang should immediately fix this (or whomevers responsible) If I want to delete every piece of data from a companies storage (including backups, caches et al) I should be able to do that. If it is ever proven that data still exists on an individual whose requested full deletion the CEO should be imprisoned for a minimum of one year. But of course that will never happen and the GDPR is an absolute failure that has done more harm than good.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

I remember when a Brazilian teenager was killed after a stranger in front of him at a concert turned around suddenly and pointed at him saying he stole her phone. Before he knew what happened, he was stabbed to death by a mob while the real thief got away. Vigilante ’justice’ continues to be a scourge of society; think of the stoning episodes of millenniums past. Social media removes the activation energy barrier to be a part of a mob - to feel the thrill.

scrps 5y ago

In a weird way I think cancel culture/doxxing/call out culture has given a massive boost to privacy awareness at least for people who aren't in highly visible jobs. Over the past couple of years but especially 2020 I've had more non-tech family members, friends and friends of friends ask me for advice on preserving their privacy and anonymity and political speech seems to usually be in the top 5 reasons when I ask them.

Zealotux 5y ago

"We must become the pitiless censors of ourselves." – Alain Badiou

RONROC 5y ago

Probably an unpopular take but cancelling typically occurs in domains that either deserve the maximum amount of public scrutiny such as politics and show business (the reasoning here is that the people who operate in these domains have, always will, and should be held to account for the simple reason that they wouldn’t be in these positions without the inverse, ie. positive public perception—-if you’re not useful, you’re replaceable) or in industries that have a inherently corrosive framework whose success is predicated on extracting a disproportionate amount of value from the those who are doing the cancelling such as big tech and media (no normal person will weep for these people and with good reason). The only exception here is the cancelling of people with relatively small followings/influence who receive heavy-handed negative attention (like the Reddit bomber or people in academia like the N-word professor) but instances like these are fewer and far between and will probably decline over time as boomers leave the discourse (die). I used to work at a few big media companies in a position that required a decent amount of public facing and had brushes with this sort of behavior in the past (people tweeting death threats at me, which I just brushed off because I understood what I signed up for and am not naive). These days I work for myself in a “blue collar” industry and mostly ignore social media, so I can’t really be cancelled. I guess the point i’m trying to make is, if this is something you’re actually worried about, just 1; go work in an industry that lacks the highly educated, overstimulated, and mostly out of touch people that dominate 99% of the discourse but speak for 1% of the population 2; learn how to read the room (ie. listen more and talk less) Big tech wanted everyone to have a voice and now they do. :)

rdiddly 5y ago

The Times has become one of the biggest online bullies. To be consistent the author would have to quit working there. Consider this article therapy, part of her process of working it out.

mlloyd 5y ago

A couple of things that I've learned about the country as I've watched the Cancel culture war: 1)Many believe having freedom of speech means having freedom from consequences of your speech. And not just governmental consequence but all consequence. That's wrong and always has been wrong, if rarely enforced. Speech has always had consequences but those consequences weren't cancellation. Not for white folks anyway. 2)White people can't live in the same world with the same rules that they've created for other people. Cancel culture is very much a thing and has been a thing used against Black folks and other minorities in America for decades. The list of things we get canceled for far exceeds exercising our freedom of speech. Here's a short list: A)Our names. Got an ethnic name? Expect to get less interview callbacks. B)Hair. We've had to lobby for laws to protect our right to wear our hair in 'natural' or 'ethnic' styles. C)Actual Freedom of Speech. Try and bring up racism or discrimination practically anywhere and see what happens to you. See Colin Kaepernick. D)Skin Complexion. Light-skinned privilege is a thing. Google 'colorism'. E)Accent and use of language. Google 'code switching'. You get the point. If the only thing you have to worry about is if you actually said something dumb in your past and if it's going to come up, then you have it good. Other folks are getting canceled just how they exist, from traits they can't change, and they have been for decades. And even with all that, I still think Cancel culture is pretty shit because the mob is a broadsword, not a scalpel - h/t "The Siege". It doesn't stop at Trump, it keeps going to folks like AGM. But I'd love it if those fighting against cancel culture also fight for those who aren't white men complaining about it on Twitter and Hacker News. Fight also for those who have been victimized by cancel culture before it had a catchy name and impacted the white and powerful. Probably won't win until you do anyway.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

fitzie 5y ago

we have weaponized outrage against our neighbors and it is absurd. weve gotten to the point where a hangman's noose is racist as is the OK hand sign, and it is now common for such simple displays to escalate to a federal case. we want kids to stop bullying each other in school, but ridicule, harassment, name calling, and ostracization are perfectly acceptable ways to settle disputes. if this is to change, we will have to tone it down, not pretend that someone is evil because of a single harmless thing that they said, and business leaders will have to steer their companies away from encouraging this childish outrage culture.

ergot_vacation 5y ago

There are pages of comments here now debating all the intricacies of this situation: Where free speech begins and ends, when firing is justified or not, how and if it's possible to solve the issue with the courts or congress. The cold reality is that the solution to all of this is very simple: 1. Stop using your real name (and personal information) online. 2. Stop using social media sites (as they revolve around sharing personal information). In situations when you MUST use real life identity online, only post the most bland, inoffensive things possible. The multitude of protests to this position are irrelevant: anonymity online is not an option, it is a NECESSITY because of the way the Internet works. Clever people understood this from the beginning: this advice was mainstream Internet 101 in the 90s. But as time went on profit seeking companies brainwashed everyone into a new norm where we all go around with our clothes off and our dicks out. This is not a safe or sustainable situation. The net isn't like real life. It has MEMORY, vast and sticky. It's searchable. On the net, information is a weapon, and if you go around handing out loaded weapons to everyone you meet, eventually bad things will happen. Reams of digital ink have been spilled in this comment section debating how best to keep people from firing the weapon at you. This misses the point. Stop giving it to them in the first place. If you do, you have no room to complain.

happynacho 5y ago

Ironic