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Comment by xenadu02 | Hacker News Reader

> A Pizza Shop on a crusade against 'fake news'

Getting dozens of calls threatening to kill you, having your kid's pictures reposted all over the internet, and getting doxed are not how I would describe "a crusade against fake news". This is hardly new. Swatting, gamergate, etc are all manifestations of similar things. Why are you so dismissive?

Internet mobs are easy to rile up and difficult to control. Each individual participating only takes one minor action (for example calling and yelling at the other party one time) but the victims of the abuse suffer a massive torrent of hate and slander with basically no recourse. People get fired because their employer doesn't want to deal with the harassment or bad press.

For a long time a simple accusation was enough to get the mob going. Now you don't even need that much, just some conspiracy-mongering and a few likes on Facebook and you too can send a mob after anyone for no reason at all!

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The NY Times helped rile up the mob that harassed Tim Hunt.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/world/europe/tim-hunt-nobe...

They aren't opposed to Internet mobs, just those that don't fit their agenda.

Come on, this is a complete false equivalency. In Tim Hunt's case, Tim Hunt actually said the things that were the cause of other people's ire. Perhaps you can argue that NYT's opinion pages were one sided, but at least they are explicitly labeled as opinion.

The mob that harassed the pizza shop owner was riled up by a totally false and horrific, incredibly libelous lie.

> Come on, this is a complete false equivalency.

Are you suggesting the mob that attacked Tim Hunt was justified?

> In Tim Hunt's case, Tim Hunt actually said the things that were the cause of other people's ire.

As a joke, which (we know from a recording and the reports of other attendees) was well received by the audience in general, save one reporter who saw an opportunity to profit by misrepresenting his remarks.

> Perhaps you can argue that NYT's opinion pages were one sided, but at least they are explicitly labeled as opinion.

One discussion was, the article linked above was not. It claimed quite seriously that Tim Hunt said "female scientists should be segregated from male colleagues".

> The mob that harassed the pizza shop owner was riled up by a totally false and horrific, incredibly libelous lie.

As was the mob that harassed Tim Hunt. The much bigger lie that he was some sort of chauvinist keeping women out of science.

A lie that was exposed by the many women who worked with him and defended him.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/science/article4477447.ece

Thank you. You've changed my opinion of this episode, and I agree that NYT did a great disservice by how this was reported. The realclearpolitics summary I think gives a much clearer and fairer overview of what really happened.

I hope, though, that most people would feel the same anger and disappointment that I feel over being misled whether or not it agrees with their views, instead of doubling down on false information in the hopes that spreading it further somehow makes it more real.

He said them in jest, and the audience didn't react in horror the way the original clickbait said they did, as proven by recordings. It was pure projection and misrepresentation on the author's part, and everyone else listened and believed and ran with it.

It was also false, horrific and libellous, and he did lose his job over it. Just because the stick used to beat people with was misogyny instead of cheese pizza, doesn't make the act of spreading false information any less despicable.

Edit: BTW, the fact that our media is now staffed by people who are utterly unable to separate their subjective experience from objective reality should seriously worry you. It should also make you reconsider anything you've heard about what's going on in culture wars online and offline, because I guarantee you, the people covering it do not have the statistical and digital literacy to accurately gauge the size and nature of things.

Indeed.

> Well, now that the dust has cleared and the story has faded from the American press, there’s a postscript that amounts to: “Never mind.” It turns out that, just as Hunt has claimed, the 72-year-old scientist’s comments during a luncheon at a science journalism conference in Korea in June were an awkward self-deprecating joke—greeted with laughter (not the reported “stony silence”) by a mostly female audience. The “Tim Hunt, misogynist scientist” narrative has been falling apart piece by piece over the past month; last week, it was finished off by a snippet of audio recorded by a female attendee and made public by The Times. Now, attention should turn to the real scandal: irresponsible journalism magnified by social media frenzy.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/07/22/sexist_...

Even something like this is enough to get a mob going: http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/24/politics/donald-trump-arizona-...

Yelp seems to have cleaned it up by now, but Google Places definitely hasn't. Was interesting to see how much offense people will take at something minor like this, and how far people will go - like making up a 2 paragraph story and attaching a picture of a rat in food that they found on Google. Lots of "normal" people making up stories that were completely fictional, because they felt driven to punish a business (that they had never visited) for this.

Exactly, and the NYT is using the Pizza Shop's plight for its own agenda of painting its competitors under one brush. If they really worried about alternative media, rather than dictating their fakeness, they'd educate their readers on how to analyse information on their own, instead of attempting to restore their information monopoly - where they are the arbiter of what's true.

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