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Comment by throwaway09223 | Hacker News Reader

You say yes, but can you explain how it is different? As far as I can tell it's the same as it was a century ago. The only change is the subject matter.

Do you think you'd keep your job after saying something anti-Christian in the 1950s? Look at what happened to Sinead O'Connor in the early 90s after she spoke out against child abuse in the Catholic church.

Maybe the biggest difference is that now we write when we communicate with peers, so there's evidence of our speech. I'm not convinced the mechanism behind cancel culture itself is new at all.

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> Look at what happened to Sinead O'Connor in the early 90s after she spoke out against child abuse in the Catholic church.

I don't think this is an apt comparison at all.

1. Sinead O'Connor is a celebrity, celebrities have always had more scrutiny. It doesn't seem comparable to the random employees getting fired / random HS students losing their college offers that are happening today.

2. She did not just speak out against child abuse, she held up a photo of the pope on national TV while singing "evil", and then tore it up. This was obviously an act intended to be very public and very controversial.

3. What actually happened to her other than some angry editorials? Were her performances canceled by venues?

No I'm not saying the mechanism has changed, mob rule has probably been a thing since humans organised in groups larger than 5, but the scale and level of scrutiny definitely have.

I'm not familiar with the case of celebrities or Sinead O'Connor specifically, but no celebrity in my lifetime before the advent of this new wave of cancel culture has been completely cancelled the way they are today (even Michael Jackson, who had serious allegations of child molestation, had an O2 concert scheduled shortly before his death).

Even for the average person, if you lost your job due to anti-mob comments in the 50s that didn't bar you from ever finding a job again (which is the case for some today), and this is without even touching on the way some people have had their entire twitter history crawled and pulled apart from a time when they were generally very different people.

As I said, this is probably a function of social media in the modern era more than anything else.

"No celebrity in my lifetime before the advent of this new wave of cancel culture has been completely cancelled the way they are today"

But they have, this is the very nature of the infamous Hollywood blacklist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist

Have you ever read "Time of the Toad" by Trumbo?

I think people would be blacklisted in exactly the same way in the 50s; this is all fairly well documented in relevant writings from the period.

I think we're in agreement that social media and specifically giving people access to publishing has changed the duration and discoverability of the speech.

Ah I didn't realise the Hollywood blacklist had been that serious! It's definitely not in my lifetime though, I wasn't around in the 50s. I'm also not sure that's a good example; you're talking about what could be termed a national security threat vs. something like saying you don't agree with unisex bathrooms. As I said, the scale is way out of whack.

I'd definitely be interested to see comparisons that are more like-for-like though, if they exist. I'm not familiar with "Time of the Toad", although from a brief look it seems to also deal with Cold War era issues? Again, this isn't a like-for-like comparison.

Not to mention if you uttered something even vaguely socialist/communist sounding a few decades ago, you would be fired from your All-American job, be socially ostracized, and have the FBI on your tail before you can say "Stalin is bad".

You didn't even have to utter anything. During McCarthyism (aka the second red scare), false allegations of communist sympathies was an easy way to eliminate competition for particularly immoral opportunists, especially in entertainment. The obvious weaponization was probably why the whole thing was eventually shut down by the courts.

I regret that I have only one upvote for the Sinead O'Connor reference. This isn't new, the only thing that's new is that people are broadcasting their opinions far and wide for everyone to find/see/hear.

Witness what happened to the Dixie Chicks when they protested the impending invasion of Iraq.

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