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Comment by hapless | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting that Frederick's employees quit -- her statements on twitter angered her staff so much they no longer wished to associate with her.

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.

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This line of reasoning breaks down whenever a population is experiencing any form of mass hysteria, and I think there's a reasonable argument that the US is very much in the midst of such a phenomenon right now. Indeed, that was the point of the example being provided by the poster you replied to: her staff quit because they acted based on a hysterical rather than rational analysis of the situation. They didn't break a law by quitting, but that doesn't mean this is something to take lightly or ignore. Mass hysteria is a very, very dangerous path to go down -- it's not something to brush off.

I don't really see where the mass or the hysteria is. It's an individual business parting with an employee because the views shared in public are likely going to harm the business.

Happens probably every day somewhere, why has this even become noteworthy?

I downvoted you because I am very confident you are acting in bad faith. Why is it notable? Because “Some rioters crashed a van through a gas station and I called the police” being a “view” that will “harm the business” is a novel take. I understand the logic behind it. I also know that the most fervent believers in that logic understand it is provocative and radical relative to the mainstream.

It's not a novel take at all, people have been fired for random takes that blew into shitstorms countless of times. You seem to be confused about my post, I'm not passing any judgement here in the sense of approving with the firing, I'm saying, if you make a post on some political event and you create some sort of backlash, even if you didn't do anything wrong, but you're being perceived that way, your place of work may let you go.

That's unfair but it's not a sign of hysteria, other than for the general shittiness of viral internet communication.

The person in question wasn't fired for "random takes" but rather being seen in the vicinity of services that have been seen in the vicinity of people making decidedly non-random takes on political matters. And now she, perhaps correctly, believes she is the victim of religious and political persecution.

As for not being mass hysteria, from the outside looking in it's clearly exactly that. Firing someone because of a mobile app they have installed, when that app was briefly at the top of the app store, is ludicrous and wrong.

The US left appear to be descendeding into full bore anti-conservative hysteria. This is exceptionally dangerous because when the left has taken power in the past with that kind of mentality it ended up in bloodshed on massive scales. That must not happen to America.

> The US left appear to be descendeding into full bore anti-conservative hysteria. This is exceptionally dangerous because when the left has taken power in the past with that kind of mentality it ended up in bloodshed on massive scales. That must not happen to America.

I wouldn't single out any particular faction on this to be honest. The Obama birther movement purportedly started in 2004 and Trump himself peddled the narrative that Obama wasn't a US Citizen. There was also the general narrative that Obama was the "Anti-Christ" and a secret Muslim.

Now you have a portion of the GOP who believe Democrats and "Hollywood elite" are harvesting children's adrenochromes in a massive paedophile ring.

Any argument that hysteria is the domain of one party is not based in fact.

Obama birtherism was dumb but never took over swathes of institutions like this. Even Trump abandoned it before he became President.

What we're seeing now is not merely a set of hysterical beliefs, but widespread pulling on the levers of power on the basis of them. That seems pretty new.

> The US left appear to be descendeding into full bore anti-conservative hysteria.

The corporate actors involved here are nowhere near the left, they are closer to the center-right; the problem the Trumpist faction is facing isn’t that the Left doesn’t like them, its that they’ve earned the firm enmity of the centrist factions that, even when they opposed conservatives them on certain issues, kept good relations with them because they knew the next day they might need them as allies against the Left. And, beyond that, they’ve also lost a substantial minority of the Right; the various long-time and recent Republican figures that have come out in opposition to the Trumpist faction – and not just in the usual intraparty opposition sense but to the extent of either making a dramatic exit from the Party and/or advocating for the defeat of not only its Presidential candidate but of its downballot candidates as long as the Party adheres to Trumpism is telling.

Shouting about the Left is, I’m sure, cathartic, but it is also very much irrelevant to what is going on here. That’s not where the change that is driving outcomes comes from.

That's disagreement, not enmity. Conflating the two is hysteria.

No it’s not just the “the Trumpists” versus everyone else. Almost all of these incidents involve conduct which nobody except a small fraction of the progressive left finds problematic. The mainstream left goes along because they’re afraid of being lumped in with “Trumpists.”

I expect this to change once Trump is gone and mainstream liberals aren’t so terrified of being compared to him.

As a centrist myself I disagree with the premise that centrists take issue with Trump.

I personally take issue with his heavy-handed approach to the George Floyd protests, but I consider George Bush Jr to be by far the worse president between the two. He's mostly just an arrogant asshole.

The left's response to him however... And I've spoken with many many other centrists online who agree with me so it's not clear to me why you think the centrists are anything but just silent so they don't get swept up in the hysteria (which is where I've been at for years now, which is why I've never been on Twitter, instagram, etc. Was on FB briefly and promptly left it long before it got popular to do so).

Not in countries with functioning labor law.

There is no chance they would have quit were there no hubub about it. Zero.

They quit likely because they are in a rep-based business and their boss is stained.

The 'mass outrage' is to some extent, outrage on them by virtue of trickle down or association.

The public outrage adds emotional momentum to it.

That the woman did something slightly questionable makes it one of the better examples of cancel culture, because were she to have done truly noting remotely wrong, then none of the actions would have any justification at all. Because there's a shade of possibly bad acting, we see the disproportional response.

What was the questionable decision?

Joining a website where nasty people make comments.

Imagine if every redditor was fired or or had their employees quit because of the absolutely horrific things some other users post there.

You know, there are people who think HN is one of those websites. Like, squarely in the left-wing (I'm not saying mainstream liberals think that), but it's definitely a thing.

Taking a snap of a worker on the train eating their sandwich an posting to Twitter was obviously a questionable thing to do at minimum.

> where is the hysteria

The hysteria is literally facing HARM from opinions.

Why is death threats and intolerance noteworthy? Maybe because intolerance, hate, bigotry and threats of violence should always be noteworthy? especially when concerned with those who claim to be tolerant?

There seems to be mass hysteria about the claimed "mass hysteria", at least when it relates to private business or individuals cutting ties with someone over their actions and statements as opposed to online harassment.

Over the perception of their actions, not their actual actions.

Nobody anywhere would care a single bit were there not mass hysteria.

Also it's not necessarily harassment to call out people if they are not doing their jobs. It's just very (almost pathetically) petty.

>Over the perception of their actions, not their actual actions.

Trying to discuss in good faith here so hopefully this doesn't garner venom: it doesn't feel novel to be fired or quit over public perception of actions or statements - all my corporate employers since the onset of social media have had disclaimers to not enter the public discourse in such a way that might cause negative publicity for them.

>Nobody anywhere would care a single bit were there not mass hysteria.

This is what my original comment was getting at: claims of 'mass hysteria' come off as something like a conspiracy against a specific group or unfairly targeted wrong-think, which feels like a much more exciting answer than the mundane reality. It seems hysterical in itself to not just assume we're in a politically polarized climate and certain topics of discourse easily earn you close friends and/or committed enemies - something that can make any group dynamic fall apart.

>Also it's not necessarily harassment to call out people if they are not doing their jobs. It's just very (almost pathetically) petty.

Entirely agree! I do think social media has had a tendency to allow people to indulge in their worst sides without much consequence in the case of doxxing and, well, harassment by mass-reaching out to personal lines of contact. That's really distinct in my eyes from filing a complaint to their public employer for the public perception of their public statements.

So this is a good comment - however the term 'hysteria' may not be correct, I suggest that the reaction is ultimately hysterical to the point of overreaction.

I think frankly it's driven a small group of unimportant people, causing more serious forces to act out of fear or opportunity, which snowballs into overreaction.

A 'fear' moves over a group of people causing weird effects.

Maybe we need a term for this - but how do we have 'serious consequences' out of essentially 'inconsequential acts'?

It's leveraged consistently by those that want to use 'every little interaction' as 'proof' of their particular ideology.

It's just too much, it's wearing on my otherwise sympathetic view of people.

The reason for hysteria isn't polarization alone, but also the left has a mission and is compelled to use everything to complete it, including such hysteric campaigns. Maybe it's not truly hysteria, but it looks, walk and talks like one.

Those quitting people themselves describe their quitting as punishment of bad people to make the world better, not to save business. Quit for business harm happens the other way around: when management fires an employee who started a controversy.

> The freedom of speech isn't the freedom to speak without consequences

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)

Freedom of Speech in the US is a tenet and a philosophy.

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.

"It's a free country" doesn't really add much to the discussion. No-one is saying her employees should be legally forced to stay with the company.

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.

The situation has escalated because normal, rational, calm politics has completely failed to deliver.

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.

Completely different. Calling police with a false report of an extremely violent crime is hugely different from calling police on an actually crime.

And declaring war on policing is a horrific response to the (huge) problem of under 0.1% of interactions having inexcusably terrible outcomes. Lack of policing causes far more problems than policing. And if you disagree with that, do you deserve to lose your job for your good faith belief? The anti-policing extremists hurt the people they intend to help. The vast majority of Black communities don't want to cancel the current police as a whole, they want better police.

> It's a base, mob instinct that has caused riots, factionalism, witch hunts and genocide all throughout human history

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.

I think trying to stop what causes mobs can be noble but will be done in vain, validate people’s ideas since they are now being blocked and it also has the ability to be abused. Media sites spent months blocking, banning, demonetizing, and posting disputes about election fraud but none the less there were still riots at the capital building. I like to think of all these websites as a search engine and so will use Google as an example. If Google blocks searches for illegal activity does it stop that illegal activity? No. Does it even lessen that activity? No. In my opinion is hides it which is actually what those committing illegal acts want. They may not know they want it, but it literally protects them from being found by the ones who can stand up to them, sometimes the police. Let’s say you have a person who makes a threat towards another person and that is blocked before it’s posted. Now, the person who was threatened has no idea they were ever threatened. That person is unable to report to the police the treat and has no evidence of the threat. Not only can they not prepare to protect themselves or defend themselves but their evidence is gone and the person making the threats has no consequences. Google and others do turn over threats to the FBI but let’s be honest they don’t have the time or man power to investigate every threat on the internet. So who does? Websites don’t, but the people who are being threatened do. They need to know. This example obviously doesn’t apply as well to mob attacks, but I think the solution is the same. You need transparency and more visibility to these things not less. You literally need police for the internet, not just moderators. Stop the activity where it becomes illegal but not with hiding it, find a way to enforce that through the government with real world consequences, not through moderation of a narrative.

I'm thinking more tackling the causes that feeds people into mobs, the need of people to effectively wear gang shirts because of the lack of compartmentalisation of communication caused by non-anonymous online conversations

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