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Comment by IntemerateApe | Hacker News Reader

It's like voldemort - if you say the name, you get banned.

saying a fairly-public person's name is not the same thing as harassing or doxxing

No, but an awful lot of that "saying" was in the context of pretty clear harrassment. Two things can be true at the same time:

1. Reddit went way too far trying to protect their employee from harassment.

2. Reddit's employee was being actively harrassed on Reddit.

The second is worse, sorry.

> Reddit's employee was being actively harrassed on Reddit.

Can you show the harassment versus comment about the situation?

It shouldn’t be considered harassing or “doxxing”, but this precedent of arbitrary labeling was set on numerous occasions. For example it was set by activists and partisans crying “doxxing” on past occasions like when journalist Andy Ngo documented the criminal activity of antifa groups in Portland or when Zero Hedge listed the public information of the Wuhan lab’s head straight from the lab’s public facing website.

Randomly made up, highly charged words like “doxxing” have no place in our discourse. We need to have fixed language if we are to reason about the world around us in a consistent and useful manner. Unfortunately these days language has itself become a political tool and battleground.

Slang happens. By planting your flag you're relegating yourself to history. Yes, these matters deserve more nuance. Yes, many of the people speaking authoritatively are in fact missing important details or fudging the facts to fit their bias. Unfortunately, that's just the state of things. I don't have a better solution cooked up, but trying to cancel is a word is just plain laughable. (Obvious exceptions are obvious)

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