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Comment by bargl | Hacker News Reader

The leveraging of mob mentality via digital platforms is what makes me nervous.

We've always had local forms of cancel culture. But we've never had the digital weaponized mob mentality like we do with twitter/facebook/instagram/etc.

Now we have the ability to point to one incident which was recorded forever and can't be removed. Some things really should die out over time. The comments "most" people make should just, fade away after a while only being recalled in memory and allowing people to grow and get better over time.

Instead we have quotes from a 16 year old derailing their efforts to be a better human being as an adult.

We even get a similar kind of force here on HN, when a website gets blasted by being featured here. Website owners talk about being able to see that traffic.

Humans love seeing Karma in action and this seems to be evolution of that.

View on HN

The elections of the future are scary to think about. Nobody with any digital record that is public will be able to run for office. If somebody can be fired for a photo of them in blackface 10 years ago, they sure won't be able to get elected to public office in 30 years time after another 30 years of tweets, photos, and opinions. This is why I deleted all social media, and use online accounts in different non-real names. I don't want anything linked to me, because I can't trust what the mob will do with it.

A certain governor[1] of a southern state has escaped that fate though being of the correct political stripe I imagine put a big thumb on that scale.

So not all politicians get cancelled for blackface.

[1]https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/01/politics/northam-blackface-ph...

>A certain governor[1] of a southern state has escaped that fate though being of the correct political stripe I imagine put a big thumb on that scale.

Heck, we've already forgotten the certain prime minister of a Northern American country who escaped that fate, for similar reasons!

Maybe, or if everyone has some transgressions, then yours don't matter as much anymore (see: Trump)

Why don’t people just delete old posts? Do the platforms prevent this somehow?

For one thing, in the case of Reddit, there are sites which exist to archive deleted posts and comments. I believe I've used https://www.removeddit.com/ in the past to read some deleted content.

I would imagine it's relatively affordable and easy for someone to scrape social media and store it all, forever.

HN does...

To some extent we have that now, and have had it. Everyone has something in their past that they're not proud of. Extend the scope to family and friends and the muck gets thicker.

No one reasonable is going to run for office knowing there's a great chance their dirty laundry will be used to fuel the news cycle. It's not worth the risk; the possible damage to their family; and so on.

This is why so many of today's elected officials are as inspiring as the colour beige. No offense to beige of course ;)

Yes, Trump is an exception. But I said reasonable people ;)

An example: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-resignation/boeing...

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