The linked webpage in the article detailing Wil Wheaton's account of the incident is a thought-provoking read of online mob behavior. http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-...
I think it sucks that Wil can’t function on social media because of it.
As for the essay, it is philosophically a huge contradiction.
He’s upset that twitter allows Alex Jones to post, while being upset he is being essentially blocked on social media?
But then he calls the sitting president of the United States juvenile and hateful nicknames?
So which is it? The essay writes from the assumption he has the moral high ground and is being victimized.
The mobbing stuff is a legit problem and attack and makes me sympathetic.
The rest completely undermines his point.
There are two arguments against Twitter; one is they're not equally applying their own standards, ignoring the behaviors of people like Jones and Trump while punishing people who are seen as victims. The other is Twitter's standards and tools for dealing with harassment are insufficient. I don't know if the former is true or not but the latter seems to be proven by people finding it impossible to use the platform, as-is.
I don't really understand the thinking behind leaving a large platform because people you don't like also use it. The vast majority of people using Twitter, Reddit, etc. are not objectionable. To act like the presence of a few bad ones A) will harm your reputation if you also use it and/or B) your use constitutes an endorsement of them or even of the platform, seems silly. Leaving because you're personally harassed or have a hard time finding the content or conversation you're looking for is not silly.
Wil happened to walk in on a type of weapons test. I think the attack in this case would be considered a “success”. Or was it just for lulz?
Was there any cost to the attackers? Are they throwaway accounts or real identities? Is it at least forever tied to that account so that there could possibly be some future reackoning?
So many questions about the whole incident and response.
"Do what I say but not what I do..." is a terrible way to get people around to one's way of thinking.
I'm not sure Wil gets that he's never going to have any inner peace while holding on to a mythos that regards him as subhuman because of things he can't control like his race or sex.
Some of the thoughts in that post feel like they're from another century. Almost ike reading Jonathan Edwards' diary, where any time he catches himself feeling happy he has to go off an meditate on how he is but a lowly worm deserving of death.
In both cases it's actually pretty self-absorbed, but at least Edwards had the good sense not to complain to other people (or even to himself in his diary) that the metaphorical hair shirt he'd put on was uncomfortable. In that sort of mythos, the only peace the righteous can expect is a life of suffering, since happiness and success are signs of worldliness (or, in Wil's case privilege).
Definitely, this post is littered with examples like this, like pointing out Gunn getting fired while Gunn himself cheered when the exact same thing happened to Roseanne. There's just so much hypocrisy on every side. If you want the moral high ground, then don't reach for weapons when someone disagrees with you.
People enjoy when weapons wielded against those they view as enemies, but decry the injustice of them being used against those they see as friends. But in the end, war only benefits the war mongers.
Dehumanizing people is never a reasonable response, and so weapons should never be needed, especially against fellow citizens.
The things Gunn said have enough distance to them that you could reasonably say that he learned better since then. Firing him for something he said a decade ago seems off.
Barr got fired for something she said that day.
So I wouldn't say it's the exact same thing.
What happened to Barr seems like punishment. What happened to Gunn feels more chilling. It's a world that will never tolerate or forgive a mistake. That "permanent record" your teacher warned you about has come to fruition.
People love inciting the mob when it suits them, but the mob is fickle and cuts both ways. Gunn's poetic punishment for encouraging mob rule was to be cut down by it.
And frankly, I don't see how recency is relevant to such matters anyway. Should a murderer who was never caught still face justice 30 years later? Does it matter that "he may have learned better by now"?
Either forgiveness and compassion is a virtue and neither Gunn nor Barr should have faced harsh punishment more than a few sharp rebukes to demonstrate what they did wrong, or they both deserved what they got.
And let's not pretend saying words is the equivalent of murder or that what happened to either Barr or Gunn is the equivalent of the punishment faced by murderers. Murder is a far more serious crime than saying something insensitive.
Even in the legal system, there is the concept of the statute of limitations. And it is different for different crimes.
Forgiveness and compassion are virtues, but that does not lead to the conclusion that both Barr and Gunn should have been immediately forgiven for what they said.
If Gunn had said what he had said the day before, then it would be a fair cop. But he didn't. The recency does matter. Gunn can legitimately say, "Yeah, I'm not proud of that. I know saying that is wrong now" and be convincing. It's been years. He's grown, he's learned. How much growing and learning can you do overnight?
No, the point of the example was to illustrate that justice is not temporally dependent.
While I agree and disagree with some of your points, I'm short on time, so I'll just focus on my main point which you seem to have missed:
If you encourage mob justice, you deserve mob justice. A mob is not open to nuanced moral reasoning. Gunn was fully supportive of mob justice for those with whom he disagreed. Gunn therefore deserves the same treatment, and he got it.
Also, in what manner is ABC a mob? ABC took no time at all firing Barr.
Again, you're stuck in your own mindset of what constitutes justice. Clearly mob justice is not your justice. Gunn's view on Barr's firing is not the only example of his support for mob justice, just the most high profile. The mob makes its own rules for what constitutes a transgression, that's why it's so dangerous.
> Also, in what manner is ABC a mob? ABC took no time at all firing Barr.
ABC is not the mob here, they wouldn't have done anything if there were no furor surrounding Barr's comment.
But if he was already punished, then he's being punished twice. And that wouldn't be fair. Unless you believe people should be punished continuously in perpetuity for their mistakes.
Saying ABC would have done nothing is speculative at best.
You're just looking for a way to say "Ha ha, tu quoque" by expressing this "concern" over "mob justice".
Not to mention, Disney fired Gunn when the overwhelming opinion is that he shouldn't have been fired. So it also isn't even "mob justice".
Gunn's outcome is justified by simply logical consistency: Gunn endorsed mob justice, therefore Gunn's judgment by mob justice is justified by his own logic. My own views have no bearing on this argument, you're just confusing the fact that I have also expressed personal satisfaction at seeing poetic justice for a loathsome form of judgment.
> Saying ABC would have done nothing is speculative at best.
Not really. Corporations literally only take action that affect their present or future bottom line in some way. This is simple economic fact. Barr's show was making them money, they fired her because the long-term cost of the PR nightmare outweighed the revenue. If there were no cost, there'd be no reason to fire her and lose out on that revenue. The weight of evidence exceeds mere "speculation".
> Not to mention, Disney fired Gunn when the overwhelming opinion is that he shouldn't have been fired.
You have some actual data backing up that claim?
> So it also isn't even "mob justice".
"Mob justice" is not "majority justice". Mobs can reflect minority or majority views, there's no relationship here.
It's not logically consistent. You don't like Gunn or his particular brand of activism/politics/discourse and therefore you are enjoying his downfall. If his movies simply failed, you'd likely be just as satisfied.
And if the advertisers would have pulled from the show? Then the show doesn't even make them money. Is that mob justice? I mean, what isn't mob justice according to you? And what if they just don't want her there for her views. And there are plenty of times where there's no cost and things get denied or cancelled. These decisions are never purely financial.
More data than you do that Barr's firing was "mob justice". All of the actors in Guardians have expressed support for him. Other peers have decried Disney's decision. Articles were written about it. You can do a simple search for "James Gunn firing backlash".
I mean, at this point, say what you really want to say.
That's irrelevant. Given Gunn endorses mob justice, then the mob decides what is and isn't right. That's what mob justice means. The number of times you've been punished is immaterial. My personal satisfaction in this outcome is immaterial. How much you've suffered is immaterial. The mob decides what you deserve.
Further, people being judged according to how they judge others is the definition of logical consistency. To do otherwise would be special pleading.
> Is that mob justice? I mean, what isn't mob justice according to you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ochlocracy
Throngs of people driven by emotional motives rather than rational consideration of the facts and the context of any given scenario. No recognition of people's fallibility. No formal system recognizing the rights of both perpetrators and victims. Dehumanization of perpetrators. These are all characteristic of mob justice.
The rise of doxxing, shaming culture, and so on are virtually all forms of mob justice, and it's frankly abhorrent.
> And if the advertisers would have pulled from the show? And what if they just don't want her there for her views. And there are plenty of times where there's no cost and things get denied or cancelled. These decisions are never purely financial.
Those are all purely financial motivations. Advertisers pull from the show because the bad PR may affect sales. They don't want her there for the same reasons. It's frankly bizarre that you think there's any other motivation here, particularly for big corporations that are effectively amoral.
Also, I started with financial reasons then said that even after those, there are reasons things get pulled that aren't financial. And no decision exists in a vacuum. New studio head, expect cancellations of shows that are otherwise doing well. Expect shows that were about to be in production get scrapped for the new head's pet project. To say that everything is purely financial is not only ignoring that people are not rational actors, but undercuts your point about mob justice.
Or makes everything mob justice. Taco Bell removes your favorite item due to poor sales: mob justice.
You are also saying that ABC was both driven by emotional motives and that it was solely a financial move. It can't be both.
And yes, people can be fallible. Sometimes they need a stern reprimand in order to reform. And when several of those stern reprimands don't work and you continue tweeting crazy conspiracy theories and borderline racist things, you get fired.
It's funny that you believe the Barr thing was a single, isolated incident. Just say what you want to say: That you're glad that that leftist cuck got fired because fuck PC culture.
Almost enough to put me off Mastodon.
Edit: Seriously, just why the bloody hell would I participate in some system where a bunch of trolls could get my account deleted? I seriously doubt that could happen here, for example, because moderators base decisions on values, rather than expediency. Another alternative, which I actually prefer, is for absolutely no third-party moderation, but lots of tools for users to efficiently control what they see.
https://telegra.ph/Instances-to-silencesuspend-on-Mastodon-0... (this is a list of instances I found which some sensitive people recommend to block, so free speech/zero-moderation ones are included there)
Edit: And damn, the quoted post from social.i2p.rocks actually makes some sense. The language is harsh, for sure, but the support for freedom is pretty clear.
Also, how hard is it to manage accounts on multiple instances? So I could see both mainstream and fully unmoderated.
I suspect that eventually the Fediverse will be divided into two major sections: places that are okay with "pissing people off" as a source of fun, and places that require basic adult civility at the price of, say, restricting your freedom to call an absolute stranger something vile.
I dunno how well the former will survive with read-only access to the latter. I would not be sad to see it wither and die, though several decades of life on the Internet suggests that's all too unlikely to happen.
In my internet experience, it will be the fun, influential one, and the "civil" one will wither and die. The problem in this case was the abuse of the reporting system, it seems, not name-calling.
Does that mean instances will enforce basic adult civility by preventing one from insulting, say, President Trump? He is by any reasonable standard an absolute stranger to the vast majority of users, who generally will have had absolutely no personal contact with him in any fashion. I don't care for the man's politics, but I also must admit I've never met him.
Have I missed something? Please, help me understand!
I’m actually not certain this is true. I used Mastodon briefly and I remember there was one account out there that auto-followed every user it saw tooting. That way that bot’s instance would build connections to every instance it could see, which gives both (A) metrics - you can get a rough estimate of how many instances are alive at any time - and (B) a way for instances to discover smaller/newer instances if they choose to (I.e follow this bot, and now the global feed visible to your instance sees just about everything).
If Mastodon is blacklist by default, then it must have some other discovery mechanism? Or maybe the terminology just isn’t being applied in the way I understand it (e.g. perhaps it is whitelist-by-default, in that you explicitly connect to instances of your choice, but this implicitly whitelists every instance that whitelisted instance is connected to, recursively, and the blacklist is built atop this)?
Obviously the big drawback would be plunging “engagemrnt” and slower growth. I think it would be healthier. If you’re a wallflower, you find your groups, if you want to spout off, you join those groups... if you want miss manners, you join hers, if you want sailors, you join theirs.
"There was a cool feature in GNU social called groups that has never existed on Twitter or on Mastodon. A user can register a group on their server—for example there was one about gardening called “!grow”. If you subscribe to the group and then put “!grow” in one of your messages, all the other subscribers see it in their home timeline. It’s similar to subscribing to a hashtag except the group’s creator can moderate members.
...
It’s kind of fascinating to me that this feature wound up in GNU social even though they didn’t have solutions for long term management. It enabled some cool interactions. It caused a bunch of consternation when things went wrong. Users bumbled their way through.
Is it a good design? Eh, probably not. I imagine that’s why they’re not supported in Mastodon."
I think this speaks to a deeper more disturbing pattern of social interaction in the space of social media. In many ways I see it is regressing our ability to have real conversations in the same way we would in the real world. Animosity is building between people/groups that I'm not sure would happen to the same degree otherwise.
I'll go ahead and link the famous "whale cancer" article from SSC: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/14/living-by-the-sword/
In reality, Wil himself was the harasser and abuser, and the reports against him were completely justified. He got bofa'd and in response started reporting other users for even the slightest provocation. And it wasn't just reporting other users; he was specifically reporting a bunch of trans women, which really puts him in a poor light considering the fiasco with his Twitter blocklist that he put a ton of LGBT people on and pretty much ruined the lives of a bunch of independent trans artists who suddenly lost their source of income.
Now it's certainly possible that a group of people decided to mob him with reports, but personally I think it's pretty likely that those 60 reports overnight were all legitimate reactions to his campaign of abuse against other people.
Then drawing your own conclusions.
(Sorry, not picking on you in particular; I'm just quite annoyed to see this thread treating the incident as a spam problem to be solved technically. There were also people who really did not like Wil Wheaton, and then suddenly found him in their online home.)
Edit: found a new tweet that summarizes this: https://twitter.com/eiwbm_cat/status/1035716245914624003?s=2...
That directly supports the narrative that he publicly blocklisted some innocent people, hasn't apologised and is being mobbed for it.
Hey Wil, when you personally are responsible for taking away the livelihood of a bunch of marginalized people, you don't get to complain about being "attacked really viciously" by your victims.
Could you elaborate on this? I keep pretty clear of the petty squabbles that go on in the social justice space* so I'm not aware of this.
*Not to say that social justice isn't important, however there is a section that is more interested in generating noise than change. I've found most of the very minor celebrities involved are of the "noise" variety rather than "change".
The result was lots of people whose only crime was having yelled at Randi getting blocked by lots of people unrelated to Randi who were just trying to rid their timeline of nazis and etc. - and a bunch of those people were artists who now couldn't easily contact potential employers via twitter, which apparently (in the sense that I know nothing about this, not that I disbelieve this) put a serious crimp in their careers.
So a bunch of people experienced wildly disproportionate consequences for a single moment of anger online, as collateral damage from Wil trying to do something he considered good, and he's apologised for it but some people still believe he's transphobic because they don't feel the apology was commensurate to the degree of damage caused even if the damage was accidental.
I don't really have a take away here apart from "we have no idea how to do personal social media environment curation in a way that works yet". Mostly I just feel kinda sorry for everybody screwed over by the situation, including the subset I otherwise dislike.
He trusted someone that shouldn't have been trusted and in turn people trusted that his judgment was sound when it wasn't because Wil is more interested in playing the role correctly than to actually affect change or get in touch with those who can.
I'm sorry, there are a lot of people doing good work for social justice. Harper has never been one of them. There are those who use the platform of social justice to further their own brand and aren't actually concerned about getting people rights.
It's unfortunate that those people's careers were affected by getting on the wrong side of a vindictive bully, but I wouldn't call it Wil's fault. And I find it funny that Wil is getting the heat for it when it wasn't his list.
Note also that I said "the subset of people involved I dislike" to try and keep my opinions separate; I'm unsure why you're responding as if I'm supporting any specific person involved when I've merely done my best to outline the situation as I understand it.
They said it was his blocklist that he put these people on. And that simply by being on his blocklist, their lives were ruined.
That's not the same story you told me.
And ignores the part where Harper was promoting her blocklist as a superior version of ggautoblocker. She encouraged people to promote it. So to say it's his fault for promoting a "personal" list also feels hollow.
He trusted Randi. That was a mistake. People blindly trusted the list he promoted. That was also a mistake. There's a degree of personal responsibility that everybody who used that list without verifying the content shoulders.
Note that when I describe what I think the argument somebody's making is, that doesn't mean I endorse the argument, merely that I'm trying to explain what the argument is.
I'm not taking a position on "fault", all things considered.
Also, do people really contact potential employers through Twitter and don't have an alternative like email?
Beyond that, no idea - I'm a bystander who happened to've read a few articles giving various points of view on this and have pieced together what I hope is an accurate 10,000ft view, but YMMV definitely applies.
Probably the best option for people who value their sanity is to just not associate with anyone involved in these nonsense Twitter dramas.
Dude, if that's how you think and talk about people whose political opinions you disagree with, how can you expect anything better in return? I'm appalled by how you were treated. I'm on your side. But I get the distinct impression that if the shoe were on the other foot, and you knew how I voted, you would not be on mine.
From my view (not related to the USA) it does seem like a correct statement. None of the masses that voted for him have shown empathy towards others or have a logical argument. That being said if he didn’t win and it was a different candidate with the logic lacking masses I think a similar statement would be valid as well.
With all that in mind, is it any surprise people on the Left treat Trump with zero respect? And can you not understand how ridiculous it is to demand that respect when respect has not been given by your side. From the president on down, there has been no grace, no diplomacy, no kindness. This is a classic "remove the log in your own eye before complaining about the mote in another's" situation.
And that's without getting into how this administration is the most corrupt in modern American history. Perhaps the most corrupt ever in our nation. And is intent on doing as much looting & damage as possible before they're finally kicked out. Difficult to treat someone with respect when they're behaving in such a reprehensible fashion.
Or the even worse "no bad tactics, only bad targets".
We can insult Trump because he is a bad person. Trump can't insult me because I'm a good person.
Well, who decided one was a bad person and which was a good person? You? That's not exactly unbiased. Why is Trump a bad person? Because he insults good people? But what makes those people good? Because they insult bad people? Well all you've done is put a level of abstraction between the problem of why do you get to decide who is good and who is bad? And how do you make that determination?
Trump mocks the weak, the disabled, things people can't help, things he's guilty of himself. He's self-serving, he inconsistently applies rules, favoring sycophants despite their actions and criticizing critics for doing things he ignores in his favorites. He's actively trying to avoid investigation into certain aspects of his campaign. These are all reasons he's not a good person. Because good people don't do those things.
So I don't care if you dislike Trump. If your entire discourse about him is to mock him for his appearance or call him derogatory names, then how is what you're doing any different? I wouldn't want you in charge either. And I wouldn't want anyone you vouch for in charge either.
There is the concept of being the better person. There's no point in wrestling with a pig. You'll both get muddy and the pig enjoys it.
You're not entirely wrong, but in this case, the pigs are the ones that dragged us all into the mud, so it's understandable that some people wouldn't want to simply drown politely in the cesspool.
And yet I still don't think Wil would be extending any sympathy to Never Trump Republicans if they got similarly attacked either, so I echo your frustration.