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Comment by hanklazard | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, that definitely seems to be a big part of it. And I don’t understand. Okay so your company is the target of some activists on Twitter for a few days. End of the world? Maybe I just can’t understand what it’s like to lead a big company.

Just abut the only company to handle one of these situations in a way that seems rational to me is Trader Joe’s. Some people on Twitter decided that having a burrito labeled “Trader Jose” was a horrendous form of cultural appropriation and demanded the company change all products with this kind of word play in branding. TJ’s considered it and just basically said “no, move along” and the whole woke twitterverse moved on to some other target.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/...

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Agree completely. But you have to understand the mindset of everyone involved.

The marketing/PR people in any organisation care passionately about what other people think of the organisation - naturally, because it's their job to care about this.

Journalists are insanely influenced by what other people are saying and love nothing better than a nice piece of juicy controversy to get those ads clicked.

Stock markets are notoriously twitchy about rumours and "public perception".

Most corporate CEO's got to that position by climbing a greasy pole where what other people think of you is literally the most important factor in your climb.

So almost everybody involved in making these kinds of decision are exactly the people most vulnerable to being bullied like this.

But if you can resist - there's only a few thousand Twitterati who will bother even trying to enforce any kind of boycott, and they're probably not your customers in the first place. It's completely ineffectual if you can just ignore it.

Yes great points. Another factor that I hadn't considered until recently (can't remember who pointed this out) is that most C-suite employees / executive editors at media co's / deans at universities are probably in their 50's and are in what is arguably the most financially critical parts of their life ... as in, they have a big mortgage (or two), need to be contributing significantly to their retirement, are likely staring at at least a few VERY expensive college tuitions, etc. They're levered up both literally and figuratively. The cost of losing a job in this situation is a serious threat that likely has many taking what they feel is the safest path to keeping their job, and many times that is whatever that really loud crowd is demanding.

True. Also, office politics means that senior management at large organisations tend to be very risk-averse (the old "try not to be in the room when a decision is made" trope).

Telling the geeks in the IT basement to change the name of the "master branch" on that "git" thing that the organisation apparently uses, so that thousands of angry people (some of them journalists at large media organisations) aren't shouting at you on Twitter seems like such an easy choice to make ;)

Exactly like any bully. Which is what these people are.

I think when individuals or even companies roll over, it's because the mob's attack can be quite scary. It's easy to point at the people who stay their ground and say, "see, they didn't cave and did just fine."

But that's an obervation we make in hindsight, and without knowing it was like for the targets. At the time, their phone is probably ringing off the hook, media are calling, etc., and they have no idea when the attack will end or if people are getting fired, advertisers withdrawing or any of that.

I'll applaud anyone, left, right or other-vectored, who stands up to mobs, though. I'm not a fan of the phrase "cancel culture," but it gets one thing right: it is a cultural development, both the culture of outrage and the culture of appeasing the mob. The injustice of a, outraged mob declaring itself judge, jury and executioner only works if targets try to appease them. So while the culture of outrage is a hard problem because it's diffuse, anyone who refuses to accept that injustice is has an outsized effect in pushing back against the appeasement side of it.

I've been on the sharp end of a minor version of this, and you're right, it's scary. I only coped by not paying attention to it all and buckling down to deal with the things that matter. And alcohol, which helped, though it cost me in other ways.

I think it's a combination of both:

a) modern corporate culture trying to make employees take on the company they work for as part of their personal identity

b) young, liberal people working in PR departments who would be horrified if anyone personally called them racist / sexist / homophobic etc

These people go to work, see some random account on twitter saying "<your company> is racist" and a) and b) combined makes this feel like a personal attack on them that they have to defend and social signal against.

This is the most likely explanation I have come up with, because as you said, none of this really makes sense from a logical business perspective.

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