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Comment by netizen-9748 | Hacker News Reader

Would you mind sharing details about the time someone was canceled for citing facts? I stay out of the popular culture loop so I likely missed it.

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> David Shor, for example, was until recently a data analyst at a progressive consulting firm, Civis Analytics. Shor’s job was to think about how Democrats can win elections. When Omar Wasow, a professor at Princeton, published a paper in the country’s most prestigious political-science journal arguing that nonviolent civil-rights protests had, in the 1960s, been more politically effective than violent ones, Shor tweeted a simple summary of it to his followers. Because the tweet coincided with the first mass protests over the killing of George Floyd, it generated some pushback. After a progressive activist accused Shor of “concern trolling for the purposes of increasing democratic turnout,” a number of people on Twitter demanded that he lose his job. Less than a week after he tweeted the findings of Wasow, who is black, Civis’s senior leadership, which is predominantly white, fired Shor.[0]

The censorship and control of the visibility of information hits Democrats as well as Republicans. See Tulsi Gabbard's appearance on Joe Rogan. Cancel Culture is about making all unorthodox beliefs and facts unspeakable, whether on the left or on the right.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...

At the root of cancellation is the freedom of association. If you lived in a rural town and you are hated, what is outcome? What is the government to do?

I think no matter where you move, whether to Taiwan or Japan, there is a natural burden for you to understand what community affection means. Or not.

netizen-9748 asked for a reference where someone was canceled for sharing facts, which I provided. This has huge implications for the entire nation. How can we trust "facts" when everyone knows that the "facts" are cherry-picked, and certain facts can't be published without committing career suicide? Shor and Gabbard are both progressive Democrats who are heavily involved in politics. They're not hated for who they are or having "fascist" beliefs. They're hated for stating inconvenient facts.

If you live in a rural town and can't make any friends, that's uncomfortable, but it's not a threat to the rest of the country. You're also handily glossing over the fact that the "hated" viewpoints make up around half of the country. If one person does something that pisses off 90% of the town, then "community affection" applies. But if half of the town has decided that the other half are Nazis and need to be subdued, along with any unorthodox people in their own half, then that's just a naked political power grab.

From the article: Civis denied the firing happened over the tweet. The only evidence is this:

> One Civis employee, who requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions, told me, the only reason for the firing “that was communicated that I heard were the client and staff reactions to the tweet.” The employee also said that at “our company-wide meeting after Shor’s firing blew up on Twitter, [CEO] Dan [Wagner] said something along the lines of freedom of speech is important, but he had to take a stand with our staff, clients, and people of color.”

Sure... Solid journalism, given the above.

I am not yet sold on "cancel culture". I only ever hear people crying about people calling them out on Twitter, intermixed with some random people losing their jobs for actually doing really nasty shit on public record. What ever there is, it's blown way out of proportion.

I hope we are heading for a drama recession. And I hope Twitter and Facebook die over it. I wish the idiots lighting 5G towers would shift their anger towards data centers. Any, at this point. I would fund them on patreon.

I should correct that slightly because no one ever cites facts or quotes in isolation - usually they are in the context of a broader argument or hypothesis. But there have been a few cases, here Google will probably serve you better than my feeble memory. One (rather controversial) example I can think of is James Damore. His hypothesis may have been wrong (I will leave that up to the reader), but he at least did seem to earnestly back it up with data and research papers (and even though there is some debate there, at least a few experts have publicly agreed that the science he cited was well-established).

Note: I am not defending Damore's position, only stating that it was a great example of the "yellow/blue dress" when it comes to orthodox speech. People seemed to be pretty fiercely divided on whether or not his memo warranted being fired.

Try tweeting anything about sex/gender or crime statistics that doesn't fall within the socially acceptable window of discussion.

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