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Comment by CommieBobDole | Hacker News Reader

I'm torn between "My god, this is a dystopian nightmare" and "Well, you did all that in public, in print, with your real name attached, what did you expect?".

Maybe both things are right.

Edit: Since, looking at the downvotes, this seems to be controversial, let me clarify that I'm not blaming the victim, I'm questioning whether it's a good general policy to give everyone, including various bad actors, a vast database of information about you, carefully indexed and attached to your real name, that they can then use against you.

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Beyond the question of aggregating someone's likes is the fact that the actual tweets flagged are ludicrous: the system has a third-grader's notion of "bad language" and a temperance activist's view of even _references_ to alcohol (not drinking excessively, or drinking at all, but literally seeing a bottle of vodka somewhere)

Even if the language understanding were better, you would still have the issue of the "toxicity" classifier reflecting the personal opinions of the people who built the model and not the range of acceptable behavior for the public at large. These labels aren't objectively measurable statistics: they're personal judgements. The tyranny of algorithmically reified personal moral judgement is far scarier to me than bad keyword matching.

Imperfect people creating imperfect systems to judge others that change the course of life with no means of appeals is specific type of hell.

I guess my point is, that's why you should be wary about giving them that information; because it will be used, in that manner, probably against you, forever.

Is it normal to live your private life in accordance to what a future hypothetical employer might think ?

EDIT: private should be replaced with personal, as opposed to work

> Is it normal to live your private life in accordance to what a future hypothetical employer might think ?

Increasingly so. That's one of the many reasons for my minimal presence on social media.

However, it's an entirely different question if its right to be put in the position of feeling you need to do that. I think there probably needs to be some adjustment to the legal situation to encourage employers to mind their own business.

I don't really know. Are you asking if it's right, or if it's normal? It's probably not right, but it's probably normal.

My personal opinion is you should probably control the information you give other people about yourself; information is power, and lots of people aren't very nice or are dangerously incompetent, and it seems like a bad idea to give them more leverage over you.

If you live in a country that assigns points to how good of a citizen you are where this point system determines if you get credit, or housing, or a job, then yes, this is normal.

> Is it normal to live your private life

I think the OP’s point is that your “private life” was never really private to begin with.

Isn't the OP's point that people shouldn't live their private lives in public?

I used the wrong word: I meant "personal life" as opposition to "work life". I don't think personal life should be done in private.

In what universe are public tweets your private life?

> "Well, you did all that in public, in print, with your real name attached, what did you expect?"

I don't think that's the issue for them. The issue is the bad algorithmic flagging.

But that's the point; you give people information about you, some of them are going to use it against you, probably incompetently.

Why give them that information in the first place?

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