I think the biggest problem with Twitter is that we can’t determine a denominator. Twitter knows, but we don’t know.
100 people tweeting about how this guy is bad might be indicative of a general consensus or might just be 100 people out of a billion Twitter users. People then interpret it as general consensus and pile on.
We know the numerator but since we don’t know the denominator of people who didn’t comment, or disagree, or never saw, or don’t care. So we can’t figure out a ratio and many people assume the denominator is the numerator and the ratio is 1.
“The world won’t do business with this guy, I better fire him” doesn’t make sense if it’s just a very small ratio as who cares if 100 people are upset and 1,000,000 customers don’t care.
I wish Twitter had some ratio of who viewed vs who acted. Or had downvotes or something. Currently, people assuming that a few commenters is everyone is doing bad things.
This coupled with there’s always someone or a small group who holds an opinion so putting too much weight into a few commenters is not smart. Yet frequently done.
All that happens if you voice your opinion in the opposite direction of an internet mob is you get piled on too. Anyone who has been on the internet must have experienced this more than once. Introducing some facts or measure (which is hard with twitters very tiny character limit that squashes nuance and debate) in a response is just the same thing. The internet mob is a mob and acts like a mob and its best to get out of the way. Alas we don't have any riot police so they get to just rip up peoples lives however they want.
You also have to blame companies/hr for being so reactive and possibly our governments for not taking action to insulate society against the impacts of internet mobs on peoples’ pursuit of happiness. The fact that 100 people on Twitter can get somebody fired just by calling them a rapist with absolutely no proof is a social/societal failure. I highly suspect ending this person’s contracts cost the companies more money than the PR/threat of loss of 100 Twitter users business. Is nobody at these companies that participate in canceling people mature enough to let the storm blow over? Which leads to the social element, good legal systems require the accusers to bear the burden of proof. I think it’s possible that there’s a legal framework by which we could consider it unconstitutional fire somebody for somebody else’s character opinion, essentially firing someone without evidence that they create a hostile work environment or are not performing their duties. Look at CA, you cant use somebody’s criminal record against them when making a hiring decision. That law exists for exactly this reason: incarceration evidently weighs an undue burden on the incarcerated as they try to integrate back into society. And thats for people who’ve been convicted. We’re talking about mob driven allegations.
A lot of it is that journalists will amplify it as well if they are one of the 100 who sees it. Seen journalist job postings where checking Twitter for stories is part of it.
Journalists participate in Twitter at a rate probably 10-100x the overall population.
Most people don't ever log into Twitter, most journalists do daily.
I think you can look at it this way:
* For normal people, Twitter is not real life.
* For journalists, Twitter is real life.
Journalists then become the vector by which BS Twitter drama becomes mainstreamed.
We actually do know what, or who, the denominator is. A large majority of tweets come from a small minority of tweeters: roughly 10% of tweeters account for roughly 80% of all tweets on the platform [1].
If I have 10,000 followers and post something with 100 likes, that might mean 100 people saw it and everyone liked it. It might mean 10,000 saw it and 9,900 hated it. It might mean 500 saw it, 100 liked, 100 hated, 300 didn’t care. Etc etc.
This would help understand if it’s just a few loud people or indicative of all the people.
That may be a problem, but fixing it is just giving a credit score to rumor mongering. I think believing every accusation before any evidence is given is the main cultural problem.
Especially if you can make a tiger by simply clicking a share button.
It would be much harder to build a critical mass using more traditional methods of communication, even e-mail. As a result, people would spare their energy for serious incidents only.
But we have a variant of the tragedy of commons here: societal ostracism, an important but dangerous tool, is no longer used rationally, but milked to exhaustion. It has become too easy to get the ball of outrage rolling. Too many people are treated as if they commanded a genocidal death squad, when their transgression is often verbal only (not the case of this particular artist, I know).
As a result, we have a virtual Salem trial every day. I wonder when the inevitable reaction happens and people start ignoring the social networks altogether. This is not a stable, persistent state of things. Too unhinged.
“””Another great Chinese expression is "calling a deer a horse" (指鹿為馬; zhǐlù-wéimǎ) which is based on the story of Zhao Gao which goes as follows:
Zhao Gao was contemplating treason but was afraid the other officials would not heed his commands, so he decided to test them first. He brought a deer and presented it to the Second Emperor but called it a horse. The Second Emperor laughed and said, "Is the chancellor perhaps mistaken, calling a deer a horse?" Then the emperor questioned those around him. Some remained silent, while some, hoping to ingratiate themselves with Zhao Gao, said it was a horse, and others said it was a deer. Zhao Gao secretly arranged for all those who said it was a deer to be brought before the law and had them executed instantly.”””
Twitter polls are anonymous. Anytime you see a toxic thread you can throw in a poll asking bystanders whether they think the thread is going in a helpful direction. It's helpful to remind people that the polls are anonymous.
Worth noting: Twitter's trending algorithm doesn't appear to have a concept of a denominator either.
A relatively small collection of people talking about one subject can trigger the trending analysis even though that group represents a fraction of a fraction of Twitter users. Once that happens, the topic becomes publicized to everyone using Twitter's UI.
Absolutely. It's all about context, and these platforms do a terrible job of allowing one to see the big picture.
Think how many platforms don't even give a path for negative feedback, or merge the positive and negative feedback into one and present it as if that was a consensus.
social network lack of structure is their main issue .. it's freeing until you start to see all the work to ensure sanity then you start to miss the slower / hierarchical layers that used to exist.. the natural brakes.
Please don't post ideological flamewar comments to HN. This thread is mostly, though not entirely, managing to stay on the substantive side. Jumping straight into the flames is not a good idea and is destructive, if not outright vandalism. HN isn't for this so please don't do it here.
I got triggered by "Twitter knows". It doesn't. It's just a bunch of mostly toxic wannabe-in-group imbeciles.
There are lots of exceptions, sure. But still. I lost count by orders of magnitude where the twitter mob-opinion was simply totally wrong (be it "masks are not useful" or whatever you name it). Thanks to the collective Alzheimer's, despite archive.org etc., this somehow doesn't hurt the mob mentality at all.
Twitter as in the company/software platform, not the group of people who respond to a particular tweet.
Twitter's database could show how many people were shown the tweet. It could guess at how many of their users would react in this way. And you could do some surveys to find out what fraction of our cultural spectrum/Overton window Twitter users occupy.
I meant Twitter the company. Twitter has the data for who was shown a tweet.
Twitter doesn’t have a dislike but they have signals like amount of time spent, skipped over, etc. I wish they would add a frown option.
If I tell a joke to a dinner table and get 6 frowns and 1 laughing person that means the joke isn’t very good. In the Twitter ecosystem, that’s a great joke.
I think he means Twitter, the corporation, knows how many total users they have. Although having worked with analytics groups for a long time, I'm not sure that's necessarily true either.
I've fortunately never been cancelled (I don't think I even have enough of a footprint or visibility for that to happen).
From everything I've observed, the absolute worst thing you can do is apologize to the people attempting to cancel you. It's just pouring gasoline on the fire.
These people will never say "oh, you learned from your mistakes, I guess I'll back off". Most of them don't really care about the truth, they care about signaling. So an apology only vindicates them.
As far as I can tell, the thing to always keep in mind is if you wait a few days these things always pass pretty quickly. The internet has a very short attention span. As long as you never give those people a confirmation that you did something you regret, you're much better off in the future.
Of course you should privately apologize and make amends for things you've done wrong; but those things are always more effective privately and personally done anyway.
Every single internet apology I've seen has been met with "this is such a bad apology / isn't a real apology." I'd love to see an example of an internet apology where people don't criticize the apology itself (if one exists).
Even presuming that the act was worthy of censure, and an apology sincere, forgiveness can't really be given until some sort of restorative action is taken. Words, even sincere words, can't provide recompense.
Of course, most these internet based outrages and boilerplate apologies are ridiculous anyway. Sincerity is nowhere to be found.
Absolutely. From them, there is no such thing as redemption.
They want to look good on Twitter (with added outrage) for playing the hero and cancelling the 'villain of the week' with their insults and libellous accusations until the target is deleted everywhere; including their livelihood.
By not apologising, ignoring or saying anything (I mean anything), they get bored quickly and the whole story falls apart with the heat dying out. You have to waste their time enough for them to give up to move on to the next victim.
It is in your favour if you don't apologise in public. Otherwise it is in on the record that you are finished and the mob will make ridiculous demands such as: 'If you're truly sorry, do xyz...'.
> Liss said Cuomo called her "sweetheart," touched her on her lower back while they were at a reception, and also once kissed her hand after she stood up from her desk.
There are worse accusations too, but surely this is closer to light flirting than to lewd behavior? Compared to this, a certain recent US ex-president should have been cancelled a dozen times over.
The key is to not apologize and to have you career be semi-insulated from such a cancelling, in whatever form that takes (whether it's being self-employed in a way where a boycott doesn't hurt you too much, or working for someone that agrees with whatever it is you're saying and will stand by you, or just being independently wealthy).
What he's supposed to have done: “I was terrible to women. I preyed on them. I ceaselessly hit on them. I pressured them into sex. I got too drunk and did all manner of dumb things.”
None of which is illegal. It's not even a matter for civil litigation. He was not accused of doing this as a boss in an organization. Or in a workplace context. There were apparently no criminal charges. No EEOC complaints filed.[1] No abusive workplace charges.[2]
So he acted like a jerk in social situations. It's grounds for being, say, thrown out of a nightclub. But not fired.
The original complaint claimed that he was a groper. That's sexual harassment. It's illegal. It's incredibly toxic and creepy, and people who do it are out of touch cretins who make everything worse.
Citing that no one officially lodged a criminal complaint isn't a counterpoint. Most sexual assault isn't pursued. Serial creeps are plying their trade right now.
But yeah, if he's associated with a brand and he's going to important trade events for that brand and being a despicable creep, in every dimension that is grounds for being fired.
Mob mentality and so-called cancel culture are deeply unfortunate, often doing more damage than the things they are angered about. However creeps have negative consequences when they come under scrutiny, especially when it encourages others to note other creepy incidents.
> Citing that no one officially lodged a criminal complaint isn't a counterpoint. Most sexual assault isn't pursued. Serial creeps are plying their trade right now.
Actually it is a counterpoint. If someone accuses me of a crime, then refuses to pursue any prosecution of that crime, and then expects me to suffer consequences for that crime, that's a gross injustice.
In Noah Bradley's case, a lot of people just disliked him because of a reputation that he was a self-important jerk who jumped on every opportunity he could to self-promote and had some annoyingly devoted fanboys (a similar dynamic follows Elon Musk).
When the cancellation was in full swing I got the distinct impression that a lot of people were piling on to settle scores or because they just hated seeing him and his fanboys spamming up his stuff all the time, regardless of whether they actually knew him to be a creep or not.
In his apology he also referred to himself as a "Sexual Predator" and said that he pressured people into sex... These are pretty loaded terms to be throwing around and no surprise people on Twitter took the worst interpretation.
Sometimes people say that kind of thing out of shame, for example if they feel humiliated and are trying to make the humiliation stop by agreeing with the person shaming them. Such statements should not be taken as factual confessions. I don't know anything about this situation, but that language sounds like that to me. Also, the first sentence of the current article makes me think that the author is given to overstatement.
He's accused of more than being a jerk in social situations, but being a jerk in social situations is by itself absolutely grounds for being fired. The list of things you can do that aren't illegal but will reliably get you fired is long.
It's not grounds for being fired because there are no grounds for being fired. You can be fired for depositing your first paycheck in a bank that starts with the letter A, if your boss wants.
There is a specific set of things for which you cannot be legally fired - "wrongful terminations" - because terminations are by default rightful. And there are a specific set of things for which you effectively must be fired if the organization doesn't want to be seen as approving of your behavior, which is what the abusive workplace stuff is about. Note that the links you provide are about laws that apply to companies, not to individuals.
Between those two extremes, there's a whole lot of stuff for which you can be fired. Reflecting badly on the company and making their customers unhappy, while breaking no laws and exposing the company to no legal risk, is an extremely common case.
It is pretty unfair that people lose their livelihoods because of their employers' whims, and it happens to a whole lot of people who have not even done anything worth apologizing for, and I think our society needs to address this problem in general.
FYI, in most states, for most jobs, in most situations, you can be fired for pretty much any reason or no reason at all. If you are interested in workers' rights, please support collective action for labor and politicians that support workers' rights.
My brother-in-law is 24 years old, autistic and worked at the local grocery store. He was in the union. One time, he made a stupid joke about “juicy melons” he was physically holding to a female co-worker.
She claimed sexual harassment and he was immediately fired. No investigation, no support from the union.
There was no third party witness, just he said-she said. Don’t think unions are there to protect you.
His mother also works at the same store in a different department. Didn’t matter.
The mob had judged him expeditiously. The poor kid has never even kissed a girl.
>What he's supposed to have done: “I was terrible to women. I preyed on them. I ceaselessly hit on them. I pressured them into sex. I got too drunk and did all manner of dumb things.”
He could start by not posting a long diatribe about how he's the victim here?
I recently gave a test lecture about a topic in statistics, where I showed a meme that a statistics professor I follow shared on her Twitter feed [1]. I thought it would be safe to include as it didn't get any negative reactions on Twitter and was already being used by a professor in her university class in the US. After the talk I immediately got called out by the women's representative on the hiring commission, who asked me how I would think students would react to such a meme. I then explained how it makes fun of the statistical property of the mean being easily "attracted" by outlier data points, as opposed to the median which is usually not as sensitive.
She did not explain what she saw as problematic. Maybe that a couple in a relationship situation was shown or that an attractive woman was in the foreground, or that the man openly expressed his attraction towards the other woman. I apologized profusley and tried to explain that I'm not an insensitive or sexist person, which she seemed to imply with her remark though.
I have been thinking about this incident for several days now, as I really can't make up my mind if I did something wrong or not by including the meme. If anyone want to add his/her opinion I'd be grateful therefore. The lecture was directed at B.Sc. students at a university in Europe BTW.
Personally I can say it feels quite bad being called out like that, especially as someone who has never (consciously) done anything discriminatory against women or minorities. And as someone who's quite sensitive I can say that it definitely has a chilling effect on me.
The professor who tweeted that is from my own Alma Mater, which to be fair, is not exactly a bastion of cultural "wokeness" compared to other schools. That's a good thing in my book, but things that fly at NC State may not fly at UC Berkeley or even UNC. I have no idea how European sensitivities compare either, though I had thought that you all were less sensitive than most.
Still, I'm a woman and I see absolutely nothing wrong with using that meme in that context. The teacher who shared that meme, who is also a woman, also saw nothing wrong. The student who created the meme, who is also a woman, also saw nothing wrong.
It's an amusing and memorable way to teach a concept, which is great.
I wonder if the "women's representative" on the hiring committee just felt like she had to find something to say to justify her presence there.
Did you give a source citation on that meme? It's not guaranteed, but I do wonder if you would have been left alone if it had been readily apparent that this meme was created and shared by women scholars.
based on the fact that you're even writing about it and really reflecting so deeply makes me think that you're probably NOT that kind of person. and that is why all of this crap is so dangerous. actual decent people are collateral damage and anyone is up for dismantling.
my question to those who read this comment is: given all that has happened regarding canceling disgusting people (i.e weinstein) and potentially more controversial ones that maybe didn't deserve it (e.g aziz ansari) is it a net negative or a positive for society?
It wouldn’t bother me personally, but it’a a little crude and objectifying. Whether it’s funny or offensive depends on the audience. I think you got a clear signal that at least someone found it offensive, which means others probably did as well, so I’d recalibrate my behavior based on that feedback.
Also, keep in mind that context is important. That meme may come off very differently coming from a popular, well-established female professor who is passing along a student creation after class than dropped into a formal lecture, especially if they don’t know you well yet.
I think that's one of those things where "wrong" becomes rather subjective.
If you've been strongly sensitized to feelings of actual or potential distress due to unwanted sexual attraction, or the sexualization of the (in this case) female body, or whatever the problem might have been, it's probably seen as wrong or at least problematic. The sensitization might have happened due to personal experiences, or due to hearing a lot about such experiences from other people, or, well... *looks around on the Internet*.
If you haven't been strongly sensitized that way, there probably isn't anything particularly wrong with that. Most people would probably have some kind of a middle ground perspective where e.g. physical attraction, and its expression (and humour about it) is part of normal human experience. The same people might see it as lewd or inappropriate in other contexts, or if expressed in other ways, or when it's too much. It might sometimes feel uncomfortable, and the extent to which people tolerate (and want to tolerate) that varies, as does the line where people begin to deem it "not right".
Which part of the spectrum is right or wrong is not an objective question. Right now lots of people (at least in social media) seem to be rather preoccupied with the former, perhaps because legitimate problems have often been overlooked. Some people who are in the former end of the spectrum are being rather aggressive. The anger is often understandable, although that doesn't mean they're objectively right or that you're wrong if you don't follow the same line.
With that said, people who were already sensitive about not causing ill feelings were probably not the actual problem in the first place.
>I have been thinking about this incident for several days now, as I really can't make up my mind if I did something wrong or not by including the meme. If anyone want to add his/her opinion I'd be grateful therefore.
As others have said, you did absolutely nothing wrong.
Seems fine to me, but without actually having someone's objection explained it's difficult to say. The problem with these situations is that actually I've definitely witnessed situations in the past where I've seen something problematic/racist and even after explaining to the person what's wrong they still come out saying "I still don't see the problem". I'm not saying you're in the wrong in this particularly case- just mentioning that that's also a thing.
Honestly, the biggest mistake people make is issuing public apologies.
So far, we have very few examples of them actually working. On the contrary, any amount of admission seems to show weakness. The "controversy" around Lin-Manuel Miranda seems to have come nearly entirely from his apology to a very small group of disappointed fans.
There are even more examples of very publicly terrible people who have skirted worse controversies simply by ignoring them! There is no reward for being self-aware or apologetic. But there are rewards for unyielding self-righteousness.
In the classical music world, there is a recent example of a composer getting canceled for a complete misinterpretation of an Instagram post. His publisher demanded he apologize, in fact, it provided a pre-written apology for him to just sign. He refused to do so, and his publisher dropped him entirely, which basically ended his career, at least for the time being. So, some people are compelled by employment reasons to apologize, and the apology does work in terms of keeping one’s job.
I have yet to see a well-defined playbook for mitigating the Twitter Eye Of Sauron turning on a person that has a better success record than chance. Different things have worked for different individuals (including issuing a public apology, see https://www.vulture.com/2020/12/influencer-apologies-2020-sh... for a collection of them and the result).
It may be the case that cancellations are too circumstance-specific to say what works and what doesn't.
It may be before the online mobs grew large enough, but Tim Hardaway dealt with his homophobic comments well enough to convince everyone that he had a change of heart, and was not just trying to manage the fallout (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/sports/wp/2017/02/16/ten...).
Doing or saying nothing only helps if you're innocent until proven guilty. An apology just helps to clarify the situation once the issue cannot be ignored. It will not make the mobs change their minds.
Apologizing on social media does not diffuse anything. It attracts attention and those who missed the initial controversy typically try to use the apology to exact more "consequences".
Public apologies should never be done. If you want to apologize, do it in private to the alleged victim - do not do it in public.
You put scare quotes around "controversy" because we all understand that there's no real controversy to it. Miranda remains as culturally powerful as he's ever been. Sometimes people apologize because they think it's the right thing to do, without expecting their apologies to manipulate detractors into withdrawing claims. And, as we can see from this post, sometimes people have the opposite expectation.
Earlier this year when Richard Stallman was re-instated to the Board of the FSF, there were a lot of tweets expressing dismay. To one of them, I replied that I personally don't think he has done anything wrong at all - and linked to a well-known article by a woman who defended him better than me. While I found some support among a few people, the amount of hate I received shook me a bit. People started adding me to lists like "a list of people who tweet stupid things". It went on for a couple of days. The good thing is that I am a nobody - I am not known in any popular online communities, I am not famous and no one really cares who I am - so I could not be cancelled. But the amount of negative emotions and energy directed at me did affect me for a couple of days. After that event, I sympathize much more with people who have been cancelled (earlier I tended to support those doing the cancelling even though I did not tweet/comment myself).
Let me ask you - did you feel like the hate thrown at you on Twitter was completely organic? Was there anything that made you question the motives of the involved Twits?
I ask because the whole smear job vs Stallman felt quite manufactured to me; from the initial Vice article horrifically misquoting him, to the weirdly rabid hate towards anyone defending him on forums like this and Reddit.
I agree that what Stallman said was misrepresented, and perhaps the later stages of the "cancelling" were more manufactured, but the initial anger that popped up on various MIT mailing lists felt very organic to me. A bit mob-like, definitely driven moreso by emotion than a good-faith reading of what Stallman said, and probably amplified by people who disagreed feeling afraid to speak out. But I wouldn't describe any of it as manufactured.
What you are mentioning regarding the case of Stallman’s cancelling is the same pattern I have seen applied against every other voice that has a dissenting opinion of the current culture that dominates social media.
Many good points in the discussion below. However, when one of Stallman’s “crimes” was comparing US laws against that of Sudan (as mentioned in the open letter), I could not help but feel that people are looking for an opportunity to take him down for reasons other than his views on Minsky, adolescent sex, etc.
> from the initial Vice article horrifically misquoting him, to the weirdly rabid hate towards anyone defending him on forums like this and Reddit
In fairness those are both very common features of cancellations. Another that comes to mind is Damore, who never wrote what most people attributed to him. I've had perfectly clear for a long time that even smart people will misunderstand the clearest statement if it's what it's socially expected from them.
There's no detectable difference between manufactured and organic "canceling" because the major component in both cases is a horde of people who are just looking for a hate bandwagon to hop on.
Likewise if you are publishing to Vice or some other moderately popular publication, you're directly motivated to stir up drama both for clickbait and as a form of a personal power trip against those you don't like for whatever reason.
The main issue is that our internet culture is extremely primitive. We're basically animals online, most of us. And it's very easy to spur a stampede and destroy someone, whether intentionally or not.
> I am not known in any popular online communities, I am not famous and no one really cares who I am - so I could not be cancelled
Be very careful with that outlook. When I think of cancel culture I always come back to Justine Sacco[0]. She was a nobody with 170 twitter followers before the mob destroyed her life.
The whole Stallman thing was a shit show, and I think he was thrown off the board for all the wrong reasons. I was still glad so see him go, simply because FSF was a better organization without him.
But yeah, the railroading that he got was wrong.
He should have been removed simply because he has become an obstacle. The FSF does a lot of good things, but occasionally they do dumb things, and it seems (I could be wrong) that the dumb things come down to assuaging Stallman's ego.
Sounds like another round of thought-crime and obsessive reactions to stamp it out, a la McCarthyism, etc.
Reminds me of a great ST:TNG episode "The Drumhead" with Jean Simmons as an admiral, who goes on a conspiracy witchhunt. Not until the proceedings go off the rails does anyone have the confidence to resist.
It is a bit of a different category since it is regarding organizations or government, but I believe the angry, obsessive mob angle is the same.
The deal with cancel culture is power, if you're canceling Joe Schmo, or if you keep canceling someone well after they've lost everything, well then that's just bullying.
Yeah Twitter is very toxic. I got on a few lists as well.
I tried to talk to the NZ civil liberties association about freedom of speech. As it turns out they are against free speech and pro hate speech laws. I didn't know that going in. Then some people put me on a hate speech list. After that I was blocked by a large group of people I'd never encountered.
It's a weird place and I'm glad to be off the platform.
I completely believe that whatever happened to you was totally unreasonable, but try to understand that from another person's point of view, the broad "you must be against freedom of speech" thing is "toxic", just as you have experienced "toxic" behavior from the opposite side of the issue.
>If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
-Cardinal Richelieu
If some people want to use the internet to destroy your reputation, they will, and there's very little that you can do about it. You can't prove anything to anyone, and once people smell blood, they frenzy on you, regardless of the truth.
Maybe if he wasn't so self-loathing in it the consequences wouldn't have been as extreme. When the mob comes for you its best to just ignore it rather than give in to their demands. He called himself a sexual predator, what kind of impression does that give?
A sidenote, this happened at the same time as the Smash bros community was experiencing a "metoo"-ish moment, and it dragged a lot of nerdy hobbies into the mix. Many innocent people were cancelled last June, and not all of them managed to get out from the hole like Noah sadly.
Readit News
100 people tweeting about how this guy is bad might be indicative of a general consensus or might just be 100 people out of a billion Twitter users. People then interpret it as general consensus and pile on.
We know the numerator but since we don’t know the denominator of people who didn’t comment, or disagree, or never saw, or don’t care. So we can’t figure out a ratio and many people assume the denominator is the numerator and the ratio is 1.
“The world won’t do business with this guy, I better fire him” doesn’t make sense if it’s just a very small ratio as who cares if 100 people are upset and 1,000,000 customers don’t care.
I wish Twitter had some ratio of who viewed vs who acted. Or had downvotes or something. Currently, people assuming that a few commenters is everyone is doing bad things.
This coupled with there’s always someone or a small group who holds an opinion so putting too much weight into a few commenters is not smart. Yet frequently done.
I think if Twitter had an easy way to show displeasure, it would be more common, and thus harder for internet mobs to form around them.
I used to think that no one had time to internet mob strangers so maybe I’m wrong that there’s not enough attention to mob every “meh” and dislike.
Dead Comment
I think you can look at it this way:
* For normal people, Twitter is not real life.
* For journalists, Twitter is real life.
Journalists then become the vector by which BS Twitter drama becomes mainstreamed.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...
There are disproportionately loud participants on Twitter that push a toxic narrative.
If I have 10,000 followers and post something with 100 likes, that might mean 100 people saw it and everyone liked it. It might mean 10,000 saw it and 9,900 hated it. It might mean 500 saw it, 100 liked, 100 hated, 300 didn’t care. Etc etc.
This would help understand if it’s just a few loud people or indicative of all the people.
It would be much harder to build a critical mass using more traditional methods of communication, even e-mail. As a result, people would spare their energy for serious incidents only.
But we have a variant of the tragedy of commons here: societal ostracism, an important but dangerous tool, is no longer used rationally, but milked to exhaustion. It has become too easy to get the ball of outrage rolling. Too many people are treated as if they commanded a genocidal death squad, when their transgression is often verbal only (not the case of this particular artist, I know).
As a result, we have a virtual Salem trial every day. I wonder when the inevitable reaction happens and people start ignoring the social networks altogether. This is not a stable, persistent state of things. Too unhinged.
Zhao Gao was contemplating treason but was afraid the other officials would not heed his commands, so he decided to test them first. He brought a deer and presented it to the Second Emperor but called it a horse. The Second Emperor laughed and said, "Is the chancellor perhaps mistaken, calling a deer a horse?" Then the emperor questioned those around him. Some remained silent, while some, hoping to ingratiate themselves with Zhao Gao, said it was a horse, and others said it was a deer. Zhao Gao secretly arranged for all those who said it was a deer to be brought before the law and had them executed instantly.”””
Seems even more appropriate - quoted from https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/e1diq2/three_men...
The problem with twitter is that it's 240 characters of 'whatever' and that's not enough to arrive at any truth.
It's usually an emotional loaded de-contextualized statement and that's that.
sane people dont have Twitter accounts
enjoy polling insane people
Nowadays small groups of coordinated people can cause a lot of chaos in internet.
https://www.businessinsider.com/americas-top-01-households-h...
A relatively small collection of people talking about one subject can trigger the trending analysis even though that group represents a fraction of a fraction of Twitter users. Once that happens, the topic becomes publicized to everyone using Twitter's UI.
Think how many platforms don't even give a path for negative feedback, or merge the positive and negative feedback into one and present it as if that was a consensus.
In this case, he admitted to being a sexual predator.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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There are lots of exceptions, sure. But still. I lost count by orders of magnitude where the twitter mob-opinion was simply totally wrong (be it "masks are not useful" or whatever you name it). Thanks to the collective Alzheimer's, despite archive.org etc., this somehow doesn't hurt the mob mentality at all.
Twitter's database could show how many people were shown the tweet. It could guess at how many of their users would react in this way. And you could do some surveys to find out what fraction of our cultural spectrum/Overton window Twitter users occupy.
Twitter doesn’t have a dislike but they have signals like amount of time spent, skipped over, etc. I wish they would add a frown option.
If I tell a joke to a dinner table and get 6 frowns and 1 laughing person that means the joke isn’t very good. In the Twitter ecosystem, that’s a great joke.
From everything I've observed, the absolute worst thing you can do is apologize to the people attempting to cancel you. It's just pouring gasoline on the fire.
These people will never say "oh, you learned from your mistakes, I guess I'll back off". Most of them don't really care about the truth, they care about signaling. So an apology only vindicates them.
As far as I can tell, the thing to always keep in mind is if you wait a few days these things always pass pretty quickly. The internet has a very short attention span. As long as you never give those people a confirmation that you did something you regret, you're much better off in the future.
Of course you should privately apologize and make amends for things you've done wrong; but those things are always more effective privately and personally done anyway.
Of course, most these internet based outrages and boilerplate apologies are ridiculous anyway. Sincerity is nowhere to be found.
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They want to look good on Twitter (with added outrage) for playing the hero and cancelling the 'villain of the week' with their insults and libellous accusations until the target is deleted everywhere; including their livelihood.
By not apologising, ignoring or saying anything (I mean anything), they get bored quickly and the whole story falls apart with the heat dying out. You have to waste their time enough for them to give up to move on to the next victim.
It is in your favour if you don't apologise in public. Otherwise it is in on the record that you are finished and the mob will make ridiculous demands such as: 'If you're truly sorry, do xyz...'.
See where this goes?
> Liss said Cuomo called her "sweetheart," touched her on her lower back while they were at a reception, and also once kissed her hand after she stood up from her desk.
There are worse accusations too, but surely this is closer to light flirting than to lewd behavior? Compared to this, a certain recent US ex-president should have been cancelled a dozen times over.
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But I'm not convinced that waiting silently for things to blow over actually works. Are there any examples of this?
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None of which is illegal. It's not even a matter for civil litigation. He was not accused of doing this as a boss in an organization. Or in a workplace context. There were apparently no criminal charges. No EEOC complaints filed.[1] No abusive workplace charges.[2]
So he acted like a jerk in social situations. It's grounds for being, say, thrown out of a nightclub. But not fired.
[1] https://www.eeoc.gov/sexual-harassment
[2] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-sexual-ha...
Citing that no one officially lodged a criminal complaint isn't a counterpoint. Most sexual assault isn't pursued. Serial creeps are plying their trade right now.
But yeah, if he's associated with a brand and he's going to important trade events for that brand and being a despicable creep, in every dimension that is grounds for being fired.
Mob mentality and so-called cancel culture are deeply unfortunate, often doing more damage than the things they are angered about. However creeps have negative consequences when they come under scrutiny, especially when it encourages others to note other creepy incidents.
Actually it is a counterpoint. If someone accuses me of a crime, then refuses to pursue any prosecution of that crime, and then expects me to suffer consequences for that crime, that's a gross injustice.
That's why we have a justice system.
When the cancellation was in full swing I got the distinct impression that a lot of people were piling on to settle scores or because they just hated seeing him and his fanboys spamming up his stuff all the time, regardless of whether they actually knew him to be a creep or not.
Your argument here is that he's guilty until proven innocent.
He might be worse than Prince Andrew at PR.
https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2020/06/noah-bradley-admi...
That runs contrary to most companies I've worked at.
There is a specific set of things for which you cannot be legally fired - "wrongful terminations" - because terminations are by default rightful. And there are a specific set of things for which you effectively must be fired if the organization doesn't want to be seen as approving of your behavior, which is what the abusive workplace stuff is about. Note that the links you provide are about laws that apply to companies, not to individuals.
Between those two extremes, there's a whole lot of stuff for which you can be fired. Reflecting badly on the company and making their customers unhappy, while breaking no laws and exposing the company to no legal risk, is an extremely common case.
It is pretty unfair that people lose their livelihoods because of their employers' whims, and it happens to a whole lot of people who have not even done anything worth apologizing for, and I think our society needs to address this problem in general.
In the US this broadly isn't true, employers can fire someone even if they haven't done anything illegal
She claimed sexual harassment and he was immediately fired. No investigation, no support from the union.
There was no third party witness, just he said-she said. Don’t think unions are there to protect you.
His mother also works at the same store in a different department. Didn’t matter.
The mob had judged him expeditiously. The poor kid has never even kissed a girl.
He could start by not posting a long diatribe about how he's the victim here?
"pressuring" isn't a word used in legal texts anyway.
She did not explain what she saw as problematic. Maybe that a couple in a relationship situation was shown or that an attractive woman was in the foreground, or that the man openly expressed his attraction towards the other woman. I apologized profusley and tried to explain that I'm not an insensitive or sexist person, which she seemed to imply with her remark though.
I have been thinking about this incident for several days now, as I really can't make up my mind if I did something wrong or not by including the meme. If anyone want to add his/her opinion I'd be grateful therefore. The lecture was directed at B.Sc. students at a university in Europe BTW.
Personally I can say it feels quite bad being called out like that, especially as someone who has never (consciously) done anything discriminatory against women or minorities. And as someone who's quite sensitive I can say that it definitely has a chilling effect on me.
[1] https://twitter.com/annaegalite/status/1166446645204213760
Still, I'm a woman and I see absolutely nothing wrong with using that meme in that context. The teacher who shared that meme, who is also a woman, also saw nothing wrong. The student who created the meme, who is also a woman, also saw nothing wrong.
It's an amusing and memorable way to teach a concept, which is great.
I wonder if the "women's representative" on the hiring committee just felt like she had to find something to say to justify her presence there.
Did you give a source citation on that meme? It's not guaranteed, but I do wonder if you would have been left alone if it had been readily apparent that this meme was created and shared by women scholars.
my question to those who read this comment is: given all that has happened regarding canceling disgusting people (i.e weinstein) and potentially more controversial ones that maybe didn't deserve it (e.g aziz ansari) is it a net negative or a positive for society?
Also, keep in mind that context is important. That meme may come off very differently coming from a popular, well-established female professor who is passing along a student creation after class than dropped into a formal lecture, especially if they don’t know you well yet.
If you've been strongly sensitized to feelings of actual or potential distress due to unwanted sexual attraction, or the sexualization of the (in this case) female body, or whatever the problem might have been, it's probably seen as wrong or at least problematic. The sensitization might have happened due to personal experiences, or due to hearing a lot about such experiences from other people, or, well... *looks around on the Internet*.
If you haven't been strongly sensitized that way, there probably isn't anything particularly wrong with that. Most people would probably have some kind of a middle ground perspective where e.g. physical attraction, and its expression (and humour about it) is part of normal human experience. The same people might see it as lewd or inappropriate in other contexts, or if expressed in other ways, or when it's too much. It might sometimes feel uncomfortable, and the extent to which people tolerate (and want to tolerate) that varies, as does the line where people begin to deem it "not right".
Which part of the spectrum is right or wrong is not an objective question. Right now lots of people (at least in social media) seem to be rather preoccupied with the former, perhaps because legitimate problems have often been overlooked. Some people who are in the former end of the spectrum are being rather aggressive. The anger is often understandable, although that doesn't mean they're objectively right or that you're wrong if you don't follow the same line.
With that said, people who were already sensitive about not causing ill feelings were probably not the actual problem in the first place.
This is just my random view, of course.
In a situation like that it's fair to ask what in particular was a problem. If they can't give a reasonable response you should ignore them.
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As others have said, you did absolutely nothing wrong.
Feel free to point the hiring commission to The New York Times (<https://twitter.com/AlecMacGillis/status/1133724550871560192>).
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but on the other hand - holy **, you better get thick skin quick enough, because life's gonna be way harsher than this.
Maybe sorry that you mistakenly upset her. But be careful about apologizing for something when you didn't do anything wrong.
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So far, we have very few examples of them actually working. On the contrary, any amount of admission seems to show weakness. The "controversy" around Lin-Manuel Miranda seems to have come nearly entirely from his apology to a very small group of disappointed fans.
There are even more examples of very publicly terrible people who have skirted worse controversies simply by ignoring them! There is no reward for being self-aware or apologetic. But there are rewards for unyielding self-righteousness.
That sounds like a lawsuit in the making, even if he wasn't a formal employee.
It may be the case that cancellations are too circumstance-specific to say what works and what doesn't.
That's not the purpose of an apology. An apology is something you do to help the victims move forward, not something you do to minimize consequences.
Public apologies are just emotional porn for the Twitter masses. They serve no purpose, and are a desperate attempt to satiate the insatiable.
In either case, a good apology should show some sincere character development on your part.
The proper behavior is not much different than dealing with an angry bear. Showing weakness doesn’t work, ever.
Sad but true.
Public apologies should never be done. If you want to apologize, do it in private to the alleged victim - do not do it in public.
Let me ask you - did you feel like the hate thrown at you on Twitter was completely organic? Was there anything that made you question the motives of the involved Twits?
I ask because the whole smear job vs Stallman felt quite manufactured to me; from the initial Vice article horrifically misquoting him, to the weirdly rabid hate towards anyone defending him on forums like this and Reddit.
What you are mentioning regarding the case of Stallman’s cancelling is the same pattern I have seen applied against every other voice that has a dissenting opinion of the current culture that dominates social media.
In fairness those are both very common features of cancellations. Another that comes to mind is Damore, who never wrote what most people attributed to him. I've had perfectly clear for a long time that even smart people will misunderstand the clearest statement if it's what it's socially expected from them.
Likewise if you are publishing to Vice or some other moderately popular publication, you're directly motivated to stir up drama both for clickbait and as a form of a personal power trip against those you don't like for whatever reason.
The main issue is that our internet culture is extremely primitive. We're basically animals online, most of us. And it's very easy to spur a stampede and destroy someone, whether intentionally or not.
Be very careful with that outlook. When I think of cancel culture I always come back to Justine Sacco[0]. She was a nobody with 170 twitter followers before the mob destroyed her life.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-t...
But yeah, the railroading that he got was wrong.
He should have been removed simply because he has become an obstacle. The FSF does a lot of good things, but occasionally they do dumb things, and it seems (I could be wrong) that the dumb things come down to assuaging Stallman's ego.
Reminds me of a great ST:TNG episode "The Drumhead" with Jean Simmons as an admiral, who goes on a conspiracy witchhunt. Not until the proceedings go off the rails does anyone have the confidence to resist.
It is a bit of a different category since it is regarding organizations or government, but I believe the angry, obsessive mob angle is the same.
e.g in cases like Derek's Chauvin (police officer / G. Floyd)
I tried to talk to the NZ civil liberties association about freedom of speech. As it turns out they are against free speech and pro hate speech laws. I didn't know that going in. Then some people put me on a hate speech list. After that I was blocked by a large group of people I'd never encountered.
It's a weird place and I'm glad to be off the platform.
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-Cardinal Richelieu
If some people want to use the internet to destroy your reputation, they will, and there's very little that you can do about it. You can't prove anything to anyone, and once people smell blood, they frenzy on you, regardless of the truth.
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Maybe if he wasn't so self-loathing in it the consequences wouldn't have been as extreme. When the mob comes for you its best to just ignore it rather than give in to their demands. He called himself a sexual predator, what kind of impression does that give?
A sidenote, this happened at the same time as the Smash bros community was experiencing a "metoo"-ish moment, and it dragged a lot of nerdy hobbies into the mix. Many innocent people were cancelled last June, and not all of them managed to get out from the hole like Noah sadly.