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Comment by j_walter | Hacker News Reader

This. We don't have civil discourse anymore...people just yell and call people names. You don't like what the other person says they are a "libtard"...or a "racist". You don't like what they are doing online, get them kicked off or dox them to your friends. Justify online bullying like it's a sport. Now it's escalated to not just banning them from social media...but a coordinated effort to destroy the alternative platform they had.

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When did speaking truth to power become "bullying"? And anyway, removing those who spew violent rhetoric is how civility is restored. The fact that the response to Twitter bans is so violent proves somebody needed to be silenced.

> When did speaking truth to power become "bullying"?

It _can_ become bulling when people will arbitrarily claim that the victim of the bullying is the one who "had power" while the mob that got them fired, say, was just "speaking truth". Which maybe they were and maybe they were not.

Not every incident of a bunch of people attacking someone on social media is "bullying", but neither is every incident of such "speaking truth to power", but a lot of the incidents of the former sure do try to pretend to be the latter.

I suspect that you're thinking of a specific set of incidents and that j_walter is thinking of a quite different set of incidents, for what it's worth.

When every corporation agrees with you and amplifies your message, can you really call that "speaking truth to power"?

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