Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
This happened during the BLM protests this summer in St. Loius. The looters she reported were blocks away from any BLM protest, and other looting bands were setting fires on nearby blocks.
Frederick was a vocal advocate and financial supporter of BLM and had attended protests in the past. Didn't stop the hordes from calling her racist and threatening to ruin the careers of agents who dared to work for her literary agency, and authors represented by her.
Her agency was gutted. All over calling 911 to report people crashing a van into a small business to raid it.
(Edited to add: I worked in publishing for years. I left because of the censorship in the arena. And I'm a proud lefty.
It's gotten really crazy. Authors getting death threats. Books literally ripped off the shelves and destroyed. (No, not rabid white supremacist books. Books by PoC authors.) But industry professionals insist this is NOT censorship, just business decisions. And if you disagree? You're a dirty, filthy -ist.)
Another edit to add links to the incidents I was referring to:
Black author/illustrator team had their book ripped off shelves and pulped: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/25/censorship-chi...
Asian author was threatened and intimidated into cancelling the publication of her novel: https://www.vulture.com/2019/01/ya-twitter-forces-rising-sta...
Black author was intimidated into cancelling publication of book: https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/in-ya-where-is-...
I can think of 10+ more books that belong on this list. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Maybe that's part of what makes things get so extreme on those sites. The most reasonable people know enough not to risk their livelihoods by jumping in and posting, and that leaves the less reasonable people to just sit there and escalate.
His crime? Writing a female character who goes on the run, has limited food, and trains in martial arts--which leads to her losing weight.
This was, apparently, fat-shaming and deeply sexist.
The authors involved in these threats and book-burning talk had literally no punishment. None. Just a bunch of new followers who gushed about what "strong women" they were. (As a woman, I can't think of anything weaker than threatening to burn a book and harass someone, all for internet points.)
The thing is, Publishing Twitter is super safe if you're on the far left. You can talk about harassing people, burning books, and purposely destroying careers. Zero consequences at all.
But if you're so much as a hair right of center left? Forget it. Your career is gone.
Yeah, I remember that one. Link to Scott's interview that infuriated those authors is here: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/child...
Don't want to dox anyone and post which authors had such horrible behavior, but I will say I personally witnessed those tweets discussing book burning, stalking, and public harassment.
>> Looking in a mirror he was startled to see a much thinner reflection of himself than he remembered: it looked remarkably like the young nephew of Bilbo who used to go tramping with his uncle in the Shire; but the eyes looked at him thoughtfully.
> Pauline Baynes's illustration of the Fellowship, done while Tolkien was alive, shows all four hobbits as being of very much the same proportions. Oddly enough, the movie shows Sam as more or less the same build when he leaves Hobbiton and when he reaches Mordor, even though he had some weeks of semi-starvation.
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/92576/is-there-any...
If you're looking at people being criticised because they're not writing characters of their own skin colour or sexuality, or 'staying in their lane' with their culture, or because their own experiences don't conform to some expectation (like the author criticised for describing slavery but not how it was in the US), then you're still looking at segregation and oppression, but approaching it in a way that is falsely empowering. It is still massively authoritarian and oppressive and extreme, no matter how virtuous people think the left wing is, and it's certainly not liberal. There's just nothing good about being at the extreme end of anything.
But that aside, and with the crowds on twitter, I just wonder what it will take for people like that to be happy, and not perpetually angry. So much aggression couched in seemingly kind language.
Liberals are not considered the "far left" and people on the far left dislike them as much as people on the right do.
This isn't a "no true Scotsman" issue either, there are clear distinctions between various left-wing ideologies and mainstream liberalism (radical or not). Finger pointing and blaming individuals, the type of behavior your describing, is classic dominant capitalist ideology, something that all flavors of the left are deeply skeptical of.
Both "radical" liberalism and rising right-wing extremism are different varieties of nihilism, stemming from the same root cause of a degradation in our overall material conditions and the breakdown of late capitalist society. Both are essentially empty systems of rhetoric with no underlying values that ultimately lead to a totalitarian way of thinking.
To reiterate, the thinking your describing is absolutely not "far left".
For now. There is a deliberate tactic on the left to become more and more extreme. A sentiment expressed today that's totally fine may not be fine tomorrow. It will be used against you. The left will turn on itself once it has made Conservatism illegal.
I've witnessed it happen to a colleague early on in my career. He posted how trivial it was to cause an IoT device to reset because they had a reset password only protected by hashing an English word that they changed every update. There are multiple security lapses there, and he didn't even mention the really scary ones, this one was almost silly.
Turns out the parent company of the IoT device and his parent company were the same, and calls got made, his post misunderstood by management, and he got told to find a new job somewhere else.
Still makes my blood boil, and I'd name names, but neither company exists anymore. It did teach me to be _very_ careful what I post online, even when I'm anonymous.
It would just be your friend that got an (admittedly mandatory) wake-up call - other employees would too. The best remedy is just a totally neutral post/tweet detailing what happened, with no judgement at all - 3rd parties will get angry on your behalf, and a lack of initial anger will only motivate that moreso.
Closest thing I've ever had to a social media presence is here on HN, where I deliberately remain anonymous.
Social media without moderators was a really bad idea, as we learn now.
See also: https://www.socialcooling.com/
Only use social-media as a read-only medium, or for marketing.
Anything you say there can, and will, be used against you in the court of public opinion, FOREVER.
On other sites, such as HN and reddit, retire your username after a few weeks / months. Your internet points don't matter.
Also try not to be doxable in general but sucks like when YT forces you to use your actual name in comments otherwise changing it would change it in email. Can make another account too. At least the comments I don't think are indexed publicly.
That's always fun finding dumb things you posted online as a kid.
The older I get, the more I understand the push for a right to be forgotten. I wish that (most?) public sites had some kind of filter where things disappeared. There is no reason why comments made as a kid should follow you forever. Or, if not entirely removed, then maybe the authorship masked.
I mean, if bad decisions fall off your credit report after 7 years, why shouldn’t the stupid tweet you posted 7 years ago? This is especially true for accounts where the person was under 18 at the time.
I'm very, very thankful that the internet didn't exist when I was a kid. And am very worried for my own children because it did when they were - I've been counseling them since they were old enough to use a computer that whatever they write will be there forever.
I’m as left as they come, but I don’t trust that the winds won’t change or I will make a stupid decision, and my future is too important to risk that. And honestly I’m not missing much. If I want to talk politics, I do it with my friends over a beer.
As a former Soviet citizen, this is particularly funny to me. Where the safest place for political discussion was at home, in the kitchen, with vodka and couple of good friends. It was part of Soviet culture back then.
This is literal victim blaming. US culture leaders have deep and worsening problems that need to be discussed openly.
That's not cancel culture. That's common sense. Don't make your coworkers so angry that they'd rather be jobless than spend time in your presence.
The freedom of speech isn't the freedom to speak without consequences. Frederick spoke her mind in a public square, and signed her name to those statements, and other people freely chose not to associate themselves with her. That's bound to happen from time to time. It's a free country.
Happens probably every day somewhere, why has this even become noteworthy?
People in East Germany were free to speak, they just got consequences.
Freedom of speech in the US means that the government can't punish you for saying something, except in situations where they can (incitement, copyright, libel, contempt of court, etc)
What you're referring to is called a constitutional amendment, which also gets pulled under the umbrella term 'Freedom of Speech' because it's a practical implementation of the ideal.
This idea that it's defensible to actively work against the ideals of Freedom of Speech because of a constitutional amendment just doesn't fly. It would be akin to me claiming it isn't immoral to cheat on my spouse because there are laws requiring lawyers to avoid breaching the trust of their clients and therefore trust isn't anything people should consider unless they're lawyers.
What is being said, however, is that we should reverse this spiralling cultural trend of thinking it's OK to rail-road/strong-arm those not on your "side".
It's a base, mob instinct that has caused riots, factionalism, witch hunts and genocide all throughout human history. It's arguably responsible for a lot of the damage in US society in recent years
I mean, her employees quit because she posted on Twitter that a business was being looted and someone should call the police (I believe, the original tweet seems to have been deleted). Resigning over something so innocuous surely points to a disturbingly reductionist world view, and that path leads only to violence.
Police shoot someone dead. There should, at the very least, be a reliable public inquiry into each one of these incidents. We could treat it as an air accident or a murder inquiry, either would work; but instead, there is nothing. Over the years, the anger about being exposed to the risk of being shot dead without consequences boils over, and suddenly there is fighting in the streets and on Twitter. The way to "reverse the trend" is for justice to be seen to be done within the system, so people don't go outside the system. After all, there's no way to end calls for people to be fired without infringing free speech.
Is calling the police on somebody making a death threat? That's how SWATting came to be a problem, after all.
This is it. In the last 10 years or so mob instinct has shown up in many ways - in looting stores, in doxing people and cancelling people who say the wrong things, in trying to overthrow governments, or just simple pile-ons. In part this has been fanned by big tech, but not entirely
The trick is tackling the causes of the creation of the mobs. "You're either with us or against us" is not new - Clinton and Bush were using it 20 years ago, but Cicero used it in Rome and it's in the bible. Big Tech is certainly a key part of the creation and expanse as it connects people, and people are encouraged to "pick a side". In traditional discourse what you'd say to your sportsmates up the pub could be a very different conversation to what you say to your collegues at an awayday. With social media, what you say to one, you say to all -- walking between worlds is difficult.
You might agree with group A on one thing (say housing), and group B on another thing (say BLM), and group C on another thing (say economy), but if those don't all align with your side, you won't fit in.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2019/05/11/dc-...
ETA: Since then, she’s also been able to leverage that experience into redemption/victimhood profiles on Good Morning America and an article in Elle UK. Both opportunities I guarantee she never would have had with her debut novel, so she’s fine.
The no-eating rule is a fairly big deal on Metro. A twelve-year-old girl was famously arrested for eating a single French fry [0], in a case (Hedgepeth v. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority) that went all the way to the U.S. Court of Appeals, where the arrest was upheld. A teenager was arrested in 2016 for carrying chips and snacks into a Metro station [1]. If I saw an employee flouting this rule, I’d be indignant too. I wouldn’t have posted a photo of the person, but the kind of vitriol, racism, and naked hate this novelist faced in response to her tweet was totally unwarranted. The potential for negative consequences on the part of the Metro employee was greatly exaggerated.
[0] https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=94999&page=1
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/met...
In this case, the original post didn't pass the sniff test to me. If I tweeted:
"Hey $operator, the person manning the gate at the station at James Street this morning was really rude, yelling at people and telling them to f-off"
I can't see any situation where the skin color of that person would come into it, so how would it be possible to get someone fired "because they're black" when that information isn't even made available.
PoC authors in this context refers to "Persons of Color"-authors.
In hindsight it is probably clear from the context - but I didn't immediately get it. :)
Weird term. Doesn't work unabbreviated as an adjective, an adjectival formation ('coloured') is long out of politically-correct favour (at least it is in the UK), and why, is 'of colour' different/better/at all a good description of someone anyway?
I'm, er, 'without colour', so it's hardly for me to object, but I couldn't comfortably use it. Fortunately (or I suppose that's why it 'feels' off to me) nobody ('of colour' or not) here seems to.
Or maybe it's just a lesson in tone etc. being harder to convey on the internet - for ages I thought 'MeToo' was against the alleged victims, as in 'oh yeah yeah me too, I'm Brian and so's my wife'.
Alas, it seems this thread was flagged. Ironic given the content. But I'll continue to share that article about the purity spiral with others, it captures a lot of the things I've seen quite well.
It’s more complicated than this. I don’t condone any harassment but not accurately disseminating the information is the same non-nuanced mob behavior that causes the harassment in the first place.
"By Claire Kirch | May 31, 2020
The civil unrest in the Twin Cities continues to take its toll on Minnesota's literary community—sometimes in unexpected ways. Thursday evening, the night before protesters set fire to two adjoining Minneapolis indie bookstores and destroying them both, the reaction to a St. Paul–based literary agent’s tweet ended up gutting the boutique agency she owns.
Three agents affiliated with Red Sofa Literary tweeted this past weekend that they have resigned in response to owner Dawn Frederick’s tweet, leaving one subsidiary rights executive besides Frederick still employed there. Frederick's official Red Sofa account on Twitter has been removed."
"Frederick, who founded Red Sofa in 2008, is a well-known fixture in Minnesota’s vibrant literary community, serving on the board of directors of the Loft Literary Center and having launched the MN Publishing Tweet Up social group. She also supervises the team of volunteers working in the galley room during the Heartland Fall Forum regional booksellers trade show each year."
So no, this was not during the BLM protests in St. Louis as the date of the article precedes when those began. Furthermore she is a "well-known fixture in Minnesota's vibrant literary community", and has been since 2008, which is something I would have expected someone who "worked in publishing for years" to be aware of.
Throwing her name combined with BLM into search engines like google only returns results after this event, so your assertion of her advocacy is unfounded and not to be believed by the above and what follows.
"Minneapolis attorney Marshall Tanick of the Meyer, Njus, Tanick law firm emailed cease-and-desist letters on Monday to two literary agents and an author on behalf of his client, Dawn Frederick of Red Sofa Literary. The two agents are Beth Phelan of Gallt and Zacker (the email was cc’ed to that agency’s two principals) and Kelly Van Sant, who until two weeks ago worked for Red Sofa. The author is Isabel Sterling, who writes YA novels. SFF author Foz Meadows also received an email, she tweeted, but it contained multiple factual errors and was recalled by its sender."
"UPDATE: On Thursday afternoon, Laura Zats, a principal of Headwater Literary Management in Minneapolis announced that she received a letter from Frederick's lawyer, threatening legal action against the agent for re-tweeting tweets by others alleging that Frederick is racist. Zats is a former employee of Red Sofa Literary, who left it last year ago to found her own agency. She has joined Phelan, Van Sant, and Sterling in their GoFundMe campaign soliciting funds in case of a lawsuit. The campaign has raised almost $15,000 to date.
Several authors have announced that they are severing their relationships with Red Sofa Literary, including Margot Atwell, the head of publishing for Kickstarter. She tweeted Thursday afternoon that she has terminated her relationship with Frederick "due to the choice she made to call the police during the protests against George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, and her subsequent decision to threaten legal action against her critics."
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p...
So Frederick decides to start suing people, which results in agents/authors not targeted in lawsuits to cut ties with her in part due to her legal efforts.
Had she stuck with the apology she released a few days after the tweet, instead of doubling down and even throwing lawsuits around, things would have likely been far better for her. Or even not publicly announcing she was calling the police during protests against police behavior.
In other words she's not the blameless martyr you make her out to be.
And finally cancelling is just a propaganda term on the political right to escape the negative consequences of their actions. This is evidenced by it not being applied when, say the (Dixie) Chicks criticized President Bush and had their careers largely ended. It's also not applied when the 'cancelling' is apolitical, such as a restaurateur who alienates their customers/community (think Cafe Hon from Kitchen Nightmares).
EDIT: Less than 2 minutes after this was posted it was down voted and flagged.
"On April 8, 1933, the Main Office for Press and Propaganda of the German Student Union (DSt) proclaimed a nationwide "Action against the Un-German Spirit", which was to climax in a literary purge or "cleansing" ("Säuberung") by fire."
In practice, the term is used to de-legitimize some opinions, while upholding others.
The term "cancel culture" is cancel culture.
Firing/boycotting someone for doing nothing wrong, not even for something "offensive", but just for appearing to have some observable qualities vaguely similar to people who do offensive things, is unjustifiable.
I couldn't believe people would actually allow white supremacists to have so much power over them that they'd circumvent such a benign symbol.
Just an observation: You are "cancelling" the opinions of those who do the "cancelling." In terms of the OP, you may or may not agree with the opinion of the person who did the firing, but it was based on someone being offended. Whether or not that offense was justified, or a good enough reason to fire someone, is a different question.
If it's a false story, say it. If it's not - what exactly are you saying with your comment?
It’s important to know who’s writing: The article is not an objective list of facts. They did not reach to the publication for comment. Some nuances might have been ironed out. This is true regardless of the political side talking.
> Newsweek reached out to the agency and to Oefelein for comment and will update this article with any response.
Instead, your comment to me sounds likme an apology to the ad hominem fallacy.
Comment contradicts what is in wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsweek#2018_investigation_an...
Maybe ask for sources before using some random post making unverified claims as confirmation for your own biases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
Maybe aggregators like HN can leverage this list, like a pre-filter for the moderators.
If it's a false story, say it. If it's not - what exactly are you saying with your comment?
It seems like this should go without saying, but some news outlets have a better reputation for accuracy than others, and a story can be "true" in a technical sense while still being designed to further some agenda by omitting important context or facts.
I'd submit that understanding the biases and incentives of a publication are prerequisites to taking any of their content seriously. This is true of any outlet. This doesn't mean you discard outright their content, but you may view it through a more skeptical lens and seek out additional corroboration.
I find a warning that a single story might be false much less useful than a comment pointing out that the reputation of the source is no longer to be trusted.
Right now it's not entirely clear what all the facts are. Perhaps she really was just fired for having an account, or perhaps she posted some things that were less-than-savoury. I think the chance that a Conservative publication would do any diligence at getting at the facts of the matter is essentially zero.
A few years ago a Conservative publication had an article that they had "proof" that Conservative accounts were banned more frequently on Twitter, based on "analysis" of the data. It took me a bit of effort to find the data, and it included shining examples of Conservatism such as the American Nazi Party. Yes, literally, the American fucking Nazi Party. It included a list of a whole bunch of other similarly minded people; I wrote down a list here: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quillette#Banning_Neo-Nazis_is...
This is a very marked example, but there have been many examples where all nuance or details were left out because it was more convenient.
This is the kind of playing field we're dealing with.
Now, I'm not saying that you should trust other publications blindly – trusting anything blindly would be foolish – but trust is not binary, and generally speaking I would trust other sources more on this topic. A Conservative publication on topics like these without details are, unfortunately, not proof of anything right now and carry very little trust.
So, do I know it's a false story? No. Do I know it's a true story? Also no. Essentially a story like this is useless outside of being a lead for further investigation.
It is the literal meaning of "virtue signalling".
Now his comments are predictably and assiduously leftist-political, and rarely on-topic to the article from what I've seen.
> The new "Newsweek" capitalizes on the brand reputation of the old one, but has no connections to it
From an external perspective it seems like the same argument could be made about the tptacek HN account. The posts from years ago which I enjoyed reading are nothing like the posts from recent history. It's like different people wrote them.
I’ve been following him on Twitter for years; and I don’t believe he had changed at all - rather HN has had more political stories as the tech sector grew.
Anyways, this is yet another reason to flag political stories on Hacker News! It blows to lose the ability to enjoy someone else's writing because you learn too much about their politics.
I found claims that IBT's other notable property, the International Business Times (which I haven't heard of), has been a content farm, but I only glossed over it.
I can't seem to find Newsweek on the Median Bias chart, but it's ranked similarly to CNN.
https://www.adfontesmedia.com/newsweek-bias-and-reliability/
https://www.adfontesmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Med...
My take is it's mostly accurate, but I wouldn't use it as a primary source.
The perfect example of that is Breitbart's infamous 'black crime' tag: Breitbart didn't need to invent stories, they'd just go and pick up out of the bunch of criminal prosecutions happening every single day in a country with >300 million inhabitants. But by choosing to focus on crimes committed by black people - and conveniently leaving out similar crimes committed by your average white criminal - it reaffirmed on their readers their 'intuition' that black people are clearly more inclined to commit crime.
So, you should always consider who is publishing a story and why.
"Transgender murder epidemic" is an even better example, it was completely made up by the media. Look up the numbers and compare them with the general population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:IBTIMES
Cite?
EDIT:
Seems like this comment is false if wikipedia is to believed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsweek#2018_investigation_an...
> The Manhattan District Attorney's office raided Newsweek's headquarters in Lower Manhattan on January 18, 2018, and seized 18 computer servers as part of an investigation related to the company's finances.[64] IBT, which owned Newsweek, had been under scrutiny for its ties to David Jang,[64] a South Korean pastor and the leader of a Christian sect called "the Community".[65]
Would not be surprising really, given what the comment is intended to do.
Waiting for that citation.
> The Manhattan District Attorney's office raided Newsweek's headquarters in Lower Manhattan on January 18, 2018, and seized 18 computer servers as part of an investigation related to the company's finances.[64] IBT, which owned Newsweek, had been under scrutiny for its ties to David Jang,[64] a South Korean pastor and the leader of a Christian sect called "the Community".[65]
At no point does it say IBT is an "odd Christian sect". At no point does it say they were purchased by an "odd Christian sect". Having ties to != owned by. But you know this.
https://people.com/crime/astronaut-love-triangle-nine-years-...
Today’s US is just a grand example of this at Internet scale and energized by social media. Welcome to shit throwing and the tearing off of genitals.
What you have now are threat displays to keep the losing tribe in its place. People identifying with the winning tribe feel good that there is a lesser party to trample on.
Calls for unity happen after a change in power because constant struggle is destructive. After a change in power, lesser chimps (tech) pay fealty to the new alphas (Democratic Congress and Presidency).
This whole system works because cooperation within a group allows the group as a whole to compete effectively against other groups. We are organized fractally in this way. To the victor go the spoils.
You see movement in both physical and virtual spaces. In people and in companies to different states. In people moving to different social media. People stop fighting with you, they just avoid you.
China is going to be the obvious dominant world power within Biden’s term.
What it basically describes people who:
- are opposed to the current political system (originally the Nazi regime)
- cannot speak their opinion for fear of repressions
. cannot or do not want ot leave their country
- do not want to adapt to the political system
Currently we have inner emmigration among conservatives. It is almost impossible to speak out as a conservative without fearing consequences. People are not revolting, but they are bascially done with the political system.
There is representation of the conservative voice both in media and the political system. There is repression, both informal and in the legal code, of Neonazi speech.
Or, atleast, that it have been obvious that they will soon be...
I wonder how many Americans know that Europe trades more with China than the US. Or that Japan also trades more with China than the US. Same with Africa.
The US is retreating into protectionism, internal struggle, and the opiate of social media.
It’s not that China didn’t play dirty. It’s just that the US is losing.
Having the most expensive military force isn’t nearly as useful if other sides possess nuclear weapons like you. Then it becomes a struggle along other dimensions.
The US seems full of entrenched institutions there just to increase their own power. Yet it is these institutions that are causing the greatest issues.
You have medical costs spiraling out of control. You have educational costs spiraling out of control. You have infrastructure costs spiraling out of control.
Changes in the political order have changed none of this. I don’t see the latest change addressing these either.
You can see this in the actions of the current alpha and the previous alpha. Neither addressed or is addressing how the above consume the largest and ever increasing percentages of GDP without producing corresponding gains.
Are Americans living longer and healthier lives? No, they are living shorter and less healthy lives.
Can a high percentage of the population make good incomes with their expensive educations? No, many are relegated to low wage, dead end service and gig jobs.
Why do we have to deal with inadequate and overpriced transportation, water, and energy infrastructure? How many consecutive years of forest fires does California have to live with?
The new administration just patches things without taking on the institutions themselves.
$15 minimum wage and making college free doesn’t make college more useful. It just provides an endless trough for bad education to feed.
More medicine for all doesn’t address the problem that it is way too expensive. It just feeds more money into a money eating pit.
More purchasing of clean energy infrastructure but enforcing domestic production doesn’t address the problem that your companies produce uncompetitive products. Will buying Ford electric trucks at higher prices than you could get elsewhere help anyone but Ford?
I feel exactly the same way, although initially, this wasn't a conscious decision. I just did not understand the hype and ignored it. For me, as a 90ies kid, social media was IRC, messengers, and email. It still is. When I first read about Twitter, I thought that technologically, it was only one step away from a Hello World web application.
[1] https://www.betterteam.com/illegal-interview-questions
I recall a case around 8-10 years ago when an employer or university admissions dept forcefully asked someone for their Facebook username and password - she declined but offered to login on a computer in the office for them to see - which they agreed to, and her profile had details the interviewers were not legally entitled to receive, and she sued and she won... - or something. Does anyone else remember?
...otherwise we wouldn't have law bloggers writing articles like this: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/can-employers-ask-pa...
I request social media links (not passwords, just profile links) from everyone I'm considering hiring, because any/all information I can use to winnow potentially problem hires out before I make an offer is extremely valuable to me.
You can tell a lot about a person from their social media profiles and posts.
So it's no longer enough to just keep your "wrong" opinions to yourself, you have to actually prove that you have the "right" opinions. Enjoy having the right opinions at the moment, I guess - until fashions change, anyway.
This honestly reads like satire. Why were they "distressed" by this and who could possibly be affected or offended by something so trivial?
Depending on the demographics of the authors they represent, it may well be a significant negative for their business to be associated with those platforms.
Companies in the states appear to wear their political allegiances as a badge of honour eliciting an us-or-them reaction. Left and Right ideologies often have wants which flip from side to side, generation to generation.
It's worrying and baffling that someone's source of income can be severed when there has been no evidence of misconduct.
You have zero idea what evidence there is and isn't. The evidence has not been revealed by those involved, and it certainly hasn't been published in this short article you just read.
You just assumed that "she used two sites" was the absolute entirety of the story.
Indeed workers rights in the US are among the weakest in the developed world. As shocked as I was at the weak protections in the UK when I moved here, even the UK is magnitudes better in this respect.
Yet this kind of worker hostile environment is what US voters keeps voting for.
Isn't this a feature of at will employment?. I know there are some protected attributes, but I was under the impression you could be fired for pretty much anything outside of those protected attributes.
How did these people get so radicalized such that speech they don't like is "extremist"?
The same kind of people were saying its fine if you get deplatformed from Twitter, but now want to ostracize you for using the alternatives.
My surprise lessened after I Googled the name of the agency. It seems like De Chiara has been flippant with her business partners in the past:
Goodman: [...] If you could represent our interests “enthusiastically,” per our deal – and honestly – that would be appreciated. We’ve all worked too hard to see this fall apart now. Dean Goodman.
De Chiara: [...] I don’t appreciate your attitude. I don’t deserve it... Just read your email again–now you’re calling me dishonest? Go to hell.
Also the whole cancel culture is crazy since it’s so trigger happy. In many ways it feels like a witch hunt. Someone says something, the crowd follows (without much evidence) and makes a ton of noise on social media. The companies see a hit on their brand and do whatever the mob is asking and pretend to be the good guys/girls.
We really do need a society that encourages fact checking and hearing both sides of the story. Amplifying filter bubbles doesn’t end well for our society.
I have given this a great deal of thought and I'm still torn on what to believe. On one hand, everyone wants to be judge, jury, and executioner. This means that the power the state has to determine these things is eroded. Probably as a result of the general loss of trust in institutions.
On the other hand, the United States specifically has a long history of what is considered community justice. Often this happens when the institutions to provide it do not exist yet or fail in their goals.
Similar to losing any kind of arbiter of truth, we are also losing truth in justice. Truth takes time, the mob is fickle, and the pitchforks are heavy.
Now that just any old pleb can express an opinion on the actions and comments of their betters it seems that collective expressions of disapproval with the intent of exerting power is a bad thing!
"Cancelling" is a boycott in the marketplace of ideas. The left and the right should find something to appeal to them there!
In California, it actually is.
https://reason.com/volokh/2020/07/26/laws-protecting-private...
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...
> California Labor Code section 1101 prohibits employers from implementing any rule, regulation, or policy "forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or from becoming candidates for public office" or "controlling or directing or tending to control or direct the political activities or affiliations of employees."
>
> California Labor Code section 1102 provides "[n]o employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity." To this end, employers cannot enact policies limiting employees' political activities or affiliations or in essence force employees to follow the employer's political leanings.
There seems to me, looking at all of this US hyperpartisan nonsense as an outsider, to be quite a bit of difference between the frothy Gab/Parler/etc contingent and an average median republican (who I don't really imagine spends a ton of time on niche social media).
If you were a rabid QAnon nut, why should I hire you? Saying republican is this context is just driving the wedge in too far.
I had a Parler login since July. Mostly out of curiosity and just to read/lurk. There was a very vocal loony subset, but that is the Internet for you.
Kicking people out of work for visiting a hacking forum is about same. After all, for the general public, hacking sounds like crime and sometimes actually is. People who deliberately choose to associate themselve with hackers are not to be trusted, or?
No. This attitude has to stop. Having nazis and far-right extremists being vocal on your site is not "the internet for you".
It is a deliberate choice by whoever runs the site to be a welcoming home for the vilest voices.
I believe that erasing such people from a worldwide forum veers dangerously close to covering an alarm signal on your car's dashboard with black tape because it is annoying and life feels better without worrying about what might be happening under the hood.
I prefer living my life without illusions about the rest of humanity, doubly so in politics.
This kind of hate SPREADS. Letting it be normalises it, and lets it spread. The antidote to this kind of thing is for the rest of society to loudly and clearly reject it, and make it very obvious it is not acceptable.
Letting people keep spreading their hate does the exact opposite.
"We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured."
Exposing it does not deal with it. It just gives it more air to spread. You actually need the dealing with part.
What makes you think that?
It's literally in the quote.
Covering up hatred is not dealing with it, it's a facile attempt at ignoring it.
It is nowhere to be seen in today's world, though. You're here talking about letting the nazis spread their hatred as much as they want, but I am not seeing you having any plan for how to dealing with them, other than just letting them do whatever they want.
Once you let them out, what are you planning to do to deal with them?
Hatred is very difficult to confront effectively. It requires inner strength and a great capacity for love. So many people lack that and just default to mirroring that hatred back at the hater, or just try to cover it up and ignore it.
It's hard to see things when you don't want to see them.
>Once you let them out, what are you planning to do to deal with them?
If you want a "plan" then simply study the philosophy and history of Dr. King.
Here's a great place to start:
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/lov...
You have no standing to deny me that.
Especially since you have pledged your allegiance to the plans of Big Tech overlords like Mark Zuckerberg who profit greatly from the engagement metrics of hate.
Yeah, no. I am actually amazed the platform lived as long as it did because there was no opposition to members voicing death threats against politicians/activists/what have you. No moderation to keep those in check.
Outside some Neonazi sites, I've never seen anything like it, some Islamist sites probably are similar.
Parler also had multiple communities depending on language. The Czech community of early 2021 was nowhere as wild as the American one at the same time. We are not close to any election now, though; this might have had a cooling effct.
Based on what I've seen and people I know who were active on Gab and Parler I would venture to say it's not nearly as high as people think. The amount of people with truly fringe beliefs is pretty small, even when concentrated.
And I'd personally much rather have this small group of people outletting their anger onto the internet instead of IRL.
Pushing them further and further into a corner with ever expanding censorship and expecting them to become good tolerant citizens has always seemed like a fools game to me.
Venting anger on the internet and it producing no real change isn’t an “outlet”, its just a pressure cooker.
> Pushing them further and further into a corner with ever expanding censorship and expecting them to become good tolerant citizens has always seemed like a fools game to me.
Containing the various white supremacist / conspiracy cults isn’t about reforming them, its about reducing their ability to recruit and radicalize. While reforming those already in the cults would be nice, its mostly a lost cause. They aren’t, for the most part, going to become “good, tolerant citizens”.
Also, receiving thousands of threats and being doxed "onto the internet" has very serious consequences IRL.
IRL they're limited physically to whoever they can reach; online they can make their hate travel the world ( point in case, there were QAnon related actions in Germany! If the Q people had been purely IRL that would have never happened)
Aside: Gab is horrible technically speaking; Firefox uses my full CPU :-/
I wouldn't surprised if I get downvoted for this, but I intend to ask anyone I interview in the future (not currently in a role that involves hiring) if they voted for Trump in 2020. And a yes will be a disqualifying answer on the basis of poor judgement. (It's also a question I will be asking any potential employer I interview with, going forward, for the same reason.)
Yes, I will lose some diversity of thought as a result. Yes it means I can't hire employees in California. Yes, there will be potential bad PR. No, I won't feel guilty about it at all. And yes, I will also run it by appropriate lawyers before actually implementing it.
It wasn’t clear in my comment, but I’m not presenting this from a middle management perspective. I wouldn’t arbitrarily be adding new requirements to some employer’s hiring. This is me speaking about how I’ll act for any company I start next (having been a founder and CEO before).
This would be a very strange question to be asked of an interviewer.
> Yes it means I can't hire employees in California
Per the article I linked to up-thread, it's not just CA:
California, Colorado, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, South Carolina, West Virginia, Seattle, Ann Arbor, and Madison.
Maybe you don't care about some of those locations, but CA, CO, and Seattle seem like pretty important ones in the tech world.
You’re correct that it rules out some important locations in tech, and I do think geography will continue to matter to a degree.
I think there’s also some appeal to a company that has strong, publicly stated principles that can benefit recruiting, but it remains to be seen. But when I consider potential future ventures, these are things I’ve considered and intend to apply.
Also, how do you plan on phrasing the question? And if you're not fully within the power to "disqualify" the candidate, what other steps are you planning on taking to prevent them from being hired by your employer? Have you discussed it yet with your employer's HR department yet?
I did a poor job in my first comment of explaining my role relative to hiring. I'm speaking from a position of having been a founder and CEO, and likely being one again. The question about how this would play it with HR is understood, but isn't applicable to me personally. I believe (as I suspect you do) that in most organizations, this would be a hard thing to instill retroactively or individually and would meet lots of resistance, unless it were a very philosophically aligned company.
“the specific political distinction … is that between friend and enemy.”
"Hans, are we the baddies?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWvpvlT9pJU
Is being active on Gab and Parler a Christian religious activity?
Being "a Christian" (whatever that means...) is a protected class - but where in the Bible did Moses or Jesus command people to use Gab, Parler - or even be "conservative"?
You can be fired for being a selfish ass (I'm referring to the donkey hybrid, as befits the biblical narrative) - and that's my interpretation of what happened. What matters now is if the law will allow her to use her religion as the basis for being an ass - or not.
And that's exactly whats happening now.
I'm not saying that there aren't people that had it coming, but it's never a good idea to switch your brain off and run with the crowd.
Of course they can.
They simply ban/allow people until they get the mix of people they want. It happens all the time on Reddit e.g. /r/the_donald, /r/conspiracy.
From SlateStarCodex: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...
So I'd say in this case, the social networks most definitely chose their users.
If you post something for the world to see, assume that the wrong person will see it at the worst possible time, even if it's years in the future. If you aren't comfortable with that, take your posts private or suspend your account, or delete your old posts, ASAP. At one point I literally walked through years of reddit history to delete any posts that might be embarrassing, even though I post pseudonymously
I signed up for a Parler account when it first opened, just for a bit of curiosity and research. Found it to be a total cesspool, never posted anything.
People should be judged for the actual opinions they express, when taken in the context of the totality of their character. But I definitely wouldn't support the shunning of somebody simply for signing up for a free service.
Heck, as a software developer and one who dabbles in activism, I've signed up for way "worse" sites than Parler. Waaaaaaay worse.
Meanwhile: There's presumably a lot of very free* speech in the Parler data dump, connected to people's verified accounts, which could easily be finding its way to employers, who in turn get to decide how they want to handle it.
* racist, treasonous, violent, etc.
Speech is speech. Think about the limits you want carefully. Especially if it starts with the thought that a particular ideological or ethnic group excercising speech should result in them "getting whats coming to them"
In this case, as the statement made clear - it's not speech that is the problem, it was that she choose to speak at all, that was the problem.
Guilty until proven innocent.
This whole discussion is a great encapsulation of mindless, reflexive outrage on hacker news.
"In a November 12 tweet, Oefelein invited followers to join her on the conservative social network, which she described as "a great platform with no censorship." Oefelein suggested earlier this month that she may also use the far-right social networking site Gab."
The fired agent also said:
"Well thanks Twitter and @JDLitAgency," Oefelein wrote. "I just got fired because I'm a Christian and a conservative."
Which makes me suspect that she was writing political stuff with her real name on Parler/Gab, since Parler/Gab are not inherently Christian sites. (and theoretically aren't inherently conservative ones either?)
However there's quite possibly a lot more to it than that.
Christianity is not inherently evil but (like all major religious texts) the Bible uh... lends itself to multiple interpretations, to put it mildly.
Surely we can agree that a lot of heinous behavior over the years has been justified by the perpetrators in the name of religion. I'm sure those folks felt they were presecuted "just for following their religion" as well.
Of course, the most politically-conservative Christians I know are not on Parler nor Gab, but they're also not Trump supporters, which seemed to be the real reason people went to Parler/Gab. That's an unsupported assertion on my part, but seems consistent with my observations.
She wasn't fired because she's a Christian and a conservative. She was fired because she was active on two sites tied to attempted insurrection. It's a bad look for the agency, but IMO a worse look for Oefelein.
0. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/06/27/parlers-f...
A big complaint of young people was that there wasn't any real difference between the two major US parties. Well, that's over.
I am not from US, but from what I saw generally both parties act the same, the exceptions are basically a few personalities that warp the VOTERs around them, but not the people in power.
Trump for the GOP (that seemly only joined the GOP because he could win their primaries... if you take a look on his pre-GOP relationships he had strong ties to democratic party) and Sanders for Democrats (and he is not even officially in the party if I remember correctly, he in the Senate was listed as "independent that sits with Democrats")
Even AOC that famously claim to be socialist got nicknamed in some circles as "Fraud Squad" because despite claiming to be socialist she is voting along status-quo US politics (that is: generally pro-corporations).
Voters believe the parties are different now, but the people elected aren't that different, it is why in USA accusing someone of doing "partisan blocking" makes sense, it is because often when a party is blocking the other, they are doing so for shenanigans, not because they truly believe the proposal is bad, often both parties believe in the proposal but want to play political games.
Being against cancel culture but from the right is "The problems (getting cancelled out of a job) are bad... but the causes (at-will employment), the causes are good."
Here in Czechia, emplyees generally cannot be fired for issues unrelated to work, and even most work excesses must be first handled by written admonishment before firing.
Enough of the authoritarianism.
Everyone should be "good" with my exact definition of good, in thinking, feeling, actions and reactions to things.
Btw Conservatives promote less government not zero government interference. I think you’re confusing it with hardcore libertarianism.
Domestic terrorism.
Please don't use HN for ideological battle or post generic ideological comments or flamewar comments to HN. All that leads to internet hell, which we're trying to avoid here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We ban accounts that do those things:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
especially if they're using HN primarily for those things:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Looking at your recent commenting history, it looks like you either are, or are perilously close to the line. Please stop.
Also the person you are replying to didn't say they destroy peoples lives based on racial hatred. They haven't destroyed anyone's lives because they're white.
I get that there is a distinct cultural bias against Black people (what people call "anti-Blackness"). Living in the south this was quite apparent to me. This is structural in nature, and quite distinct from normal majority/minority dynamics.
But I don't perceive any similar "white privilege." To go to your resume example, I've got a last name that's definitely Muslim, but I've never perceived any sort of difference in response on that basis. (And in myriad areas, from income policing to health, statistically I'm likely to enjoy advantages compared to white people.) I think the concept of "white privilege" is actually a conceptual error that comes from generalizing Black-white racial dynamics to a multi-ethnic society.
Also, to address your point about the KKK member, the left uses "racism" to mean a lot more than just that. Based on that expansive definition of "racism" I'd qualify use of phrases like "unbearable whiteness" as "racism": https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/01/the-unbearable-white...
About 30 years ago (wow!), in my late teens I organized a party on a house my aunt recently bought to become her medical practice. We had lots of drinks, some drugs, a DJ, live music and some guests walking over the roof of neighboring houses. Police got called.
When they saw me, young and privileged, they wanted to arrest me. I offered them a beer, they entered the house, one of them played the drum set with his service gun. They drank some fancy cocktails.
They enjoyed themselves for about 15 minutes until they were called on the radio. Then they told me, laughing, I should try to control my guests a little better. Then they went away.
If we weren't a bunch or privileged white kids in an upper middle class neighborhood, they'd most likely arrive shooting, as they do when there are parties in slums.
And yes I chose the kkk member as an obviously racist person but my point was that pointing out white privilege is just not racist.
Communists and Fascists share a lot of the same authoritarian tactics.
I’ve heard it said that the enemy of extremists isn't the extremist on the other side, it’s the moderates. Extremists are itching for a fight, and they’ll continue fighting forever. Moderates and pragmatists stand in the way of that goal. If an extremist group were to win and completely eliminate the other side, they’d draw some other battle lines within their own group. “Othering” is important to extremists, and the’ll find a way to do it.
I’m another proud lefty. I marched with Black Lives Matter last summer, voted for Elizabeth Warren in the primaries, I’m vegan for all the reasons people think are stupid. All of that is true, and it infuriates me to see leftist extremists getting dressed up in black and setting buildings on fire. It infuriates me to see leftists gatekeeping on Twitter, and taking such joy from tweeting people’s employers to try to get them fired for the crime of making a joke that didn’t pass a purity test, or for having a counterintuitive take on something complex. Internet pile ons are the worst.
All that said, it confounds me that people on the right seem to be unable to see these traits within their own party, and aren’t working harder to rid their ranks of QAnon, Proud Boys, and Trumpism. It seems like anyone on the right who has the temerity to point out these problems gets branded as a RINO (Republican In Name Only) and expelled from the party. Jeff Sessions – JEFF SESSIONS – was cancelled by the right for not being right enough.
So, yeah, there’s a lot of projection going on all around.
Militant left is as dangerous as militant right. The problem is not the side of the political spectrum but the approach to dealing with opponents.
I think however, cancel culture in particular, is a phenom of the Left right now.
Weaponizing conspiracy (QAnon, Elections, COVID) is a culture of the Right, no doubt.
Both sides are fully aware of what they are doing and leveraging it on purpose (not all, but many).
The thing is - if we have good institutions then we can hold out against QAnon. But cancel culture I think is actually a corrosion of our institutions.
QAnon and COVID conspiracies are not a problem at Harvard, whereas Cancel Culture is, in fact, it's being driven little bit from places like that.
We now live in the future, where everybody is either a Communist or a Fascist.
You cannot delete past HN comments.
When one group does something unassailable bad - like raid capitol hill - it embolden radicals from other groups, just raising the bar below which acceptable actions happen.
We're going to see a lot more arbitrary banning among people who might have done 'very bad things' and maybe deserved some kind of censure.
That said, I don't agree with this firing. "The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." - Mencken