When having fun on Twitter went awry for Brent
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
If you can’t even keep the happy achievements of a guy with downs from descending into an angry internet mob, then there really isn’t much hope for a positive future for twitter, is there?
While that may have originally been the intention of the site, and it might even be what Twitter still publicly claims to do, that is not at all what they actually give you now.
A couple of years ago, Twitter was awesome for keeping up with interesting new work in my topic area. More recently, it's a sh!t show of angry, snarky people I don't know, ranting about things that I either don't care about or could easily find somewhere else.
Maybe these people are all friends of a friend of a friend. I don't know and I don't care. I only log in when I have something to post -- usually some sort of shameless self promotion for a new paper or a talk.
You can read it here: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/02/i-kind-of-hate-twitter/
Encourages "drive by snark" and shows stuff to people that are likely to snark.
I don't share your pessimism.
> "Do you mean a man rather than a child Brent? It comes across as a man rather than a woman and I'm sure you don't believe that women can't choose their clothes and hair!" the academic tweeted.
As difficult as it must be to live with Down's Syndrome, I feel so much more pity towards the kind of people who gets pleasure criticizing the mentally disabled on the internet.
See, my first assumption is that the person probably ran across this tweet, saw a guy putting laundry away and bragging about it, completely missed that he has a disability and is taking pride in his ability to do normal things and just assumed it was some sexist pig who felt like he was being all pro women's lib because he did five fucking minutes of housework. Then, without so much as looking at the account to see that it was a disabled individual, they fired off their tweet from their high horse where they imagine that gender policing random strangers on the internet by pissing all over them without taking context into consideration somehow makes the world A Better Place.
Okay, they are assholes. But they are assholes whose asshole behavior would be actively celebrated in many places on the internet. It's a kind of assholery I routinely see on HN and I hesitate to say too much about it in part because, you know, pot meet kettle. If I run around crabbing constantly at people for doing that, I'm basically guilty of the same crime as they are, no?
I don't know a good solution. But my feeling was this was not about his disability. This was about "Oh, some man thinks he done good by doing five minutes of women's work. Let's let him know our ugly opinion of that!"
> But some of Brent's followers hounded the woman, even after she deleted the tweet. Jacqui tried to rein it in and said she would deal with any "bother" on the account, but eventually the woman was forced off Twitter.
The mother DM'd the woman and she apologized immediately. Lynch mob internet justice can be equally destructive as some thoughtless likely uninformed (that he had down syndrome) tweet.
Perhaps Twitter is especially bad for this because its character limit encourages truncation of context.
The main lesson here, as always, is don't tweet... it's a context-less shitshow.
Speak however you want, but as always people can label you a jerk for anything you want no matter how little offense you intended by it. It's a design flaw in language that's impossible to eliminate.
And in the second case, it's more of a feeling of disappointment. "I know you're better than this, why are you wasting your time being mean to strangers on the internet?" But I can't quite put myself into the mood of getting angry at them and trying to bully them into deleting their account or even getting them fired from a job. I'm trying to understand that.
It's the same thing. It's people who have to drag others down in order to lift themselves up. I don't think it's a good thing when anyone does it, least of all when I don't realize I'm doing it.
>> It's the same thing.
...
This is a part of the problem, both sides see their actions as "not that bad". Except one person made a single tweet thoughtlessly and the others are doing it with a hero-complex because they think they are making the "world a better place".
Both are equally uninformed but in the justice system motive is everything, as it rightfully should be.
A part of me wanted to dive right into the witch hunt and hoped that the BBC would have posted the actual name of the academic, but then I realized that I was getting sucked into the exact same thing that makes Twitter a miserable place to be. The snap reactions and the quickness to anger. It's the Social Media version of ADHD.
I hope there is hope once we get past this morass, but meanwhile, I can only see the winning move to be to not play at all.
And the people who seem to try and twist everything anyone says into something they can be offended by.
It must be an exhausting way to live.
Twitter lends itself to that, as does most social media. Other forms of more direct communication have much less of a call-out culture.
It reminds me of Donglegate a few years back. Everyone was wrong to an extent, but the series of overreactions by every person--and also the mob--kept multiplying the problem.
Then maybe they should have spent 10 seconds understanding the full context!
Reading that comment really annoyed me for some reason.
I too got really annoyed by the comment. But when I thought about why I was so annoyed about it I realised I'd been projecting a bunch of stuff onto it. I'd given the tweet a particular voice and style of talking and I thought I knew what that woman was like -- ridiculous things for me to do from a tweet.
But I'm still annoyed by it.
Common sense is a superpower, you can't expect everyone to have access to it.
These people weren't doing that. At least this person was very obviously virtue signalling by looking for things that would possibly be interpreted to be sexist, and missed that the person is disabled:
> "Do you mean a man rather than a child Brent? It comes across as a man rather than a woman and I'm sure you don't believe that women can't choose their clothes and hair!"
The other example:
> "Do you want a medal?"
is taking down someone for being proud, which seems to be more acceptable in they're in a left-designated target group (the victim here is a European male). Basically it's the non-liberal left doing business as usual.
Unfortunately, that's very unlikely to be true. When Brent's account first followed her she commented on it, suggesting he ask his mother what philosophy was.
It's pretty clear from the conversation that followed the controversial tweet that she was deliberately talking down to him as if he were a child.
In the second case, I'd bet real money the academic was not apologetic in the slightest. You know the type, Jesus Christ/Mohammed/Buddha himself could come and gently point out, "you're, umm, doing it wrong" and the response would be, "yeah, but..."
In summary, I don't think the abilities of the target played into it. Those are just the kind of people most of us try to avoid interaction with, and they are demonstrating why.
What’s with all the tough guy shit on HN now?
Who asked her? No one. No one asked them to post publicly on twitter either so “who the fuck asked you” doesn’t seem to apply.
In light of TFA, the irony of your indignation is not lost on me.
I live with a serious disability and I have raised two special needs sons. They are adults and still live with me. Neither has ever had a job, though they nursed me back to health after doctors essentially wrote me off for dead.
So I have some firsthand experience with the challenges involved in trying to talk about life with a disability or a special needs relative. It's challenging in all situations.
I don't know that it is really worse on the internet. It certainly gets magnified by the fact that you can be talking at so very many more people than you are likely to be dealing with in meat space. But I am generally more open online than in person about the special needs in the family. I find it vastly worse to deal with the crap in person.
In most cases, ignorant, appalling remarks on the internet won't materially harm me in the same way and to the same degree that ignorance and prejudice IRL can rapidly become a huge problem. There are ways in which I do feel materially harmed by such on the internet, but it's just vastly more problematic in a very immediate way to have people in meat space putting their ignorance in my way.
What went wrong?
- An innocent person has heard hurtful things about himself on twitter
- Why? (Is it Twitter is too negative? Or Twitter exposes you to greater range/quantity of remarks? Or because his mom made an account for him? ) All good questions, let's go with the first one
- Why is twitter negative? (Is it just a convenient place to expose the negativity people always feel? Is it just a certain subset of bad users who enjoy creating drama for kicks? Or does the environment lead to escalating miscommunication/conflict?)
- Why does the environment lead to escalating miscommunication/conflict? (Because you might not recognize if a tweet is by somebody with down syndrome when an online medium? Because it's easy to misunderstand somebody if you judge them on isolated remarks? Because a lot of discussion is on emotional topics which leads to impulsive tweets? Because it's easier to get angry at a remark than a person?)
...
Although people with Down's syndrome have a high likelihood of passing on Down's syndrome if they do have children, inherited cases are extremely rare.
Ironically, the article ends with "often, disabled people find that whatever they do becomes political to others".
Tragedy of the commons.
The internet is not full of assholes... Life is full of assholes, and the internet lets us all express ourselves anonymously. That's all there is to it