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Comment by theossuary | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is vile. I thought that the day the company started, and never created an account; nothing good can come from a platform like Twitter. It's a failure of our laws that there's no recourse to this kind of libel, either against Twitter for basing their business model on it, or the individuals responsible for spreading it. Lives are consistently destroyed and everyone just shrugs their shoulders and goes "aw-shucks."

Natalie Wynn talks about this on Contrapoints, worth watching as well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8

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> Lives are consistently destroyed and everyone just shrugs their shoulders and goes "aw-shucks."

There is such an asymmetry between how it feels to get piled on and watching someone else piled on.

If I was watching a stranger get their teeth pulled I can almost physically feel the pain. Watching someone harassed online is more like, "the internet sure can be mean" and then I move on.

My hunch here is this illustrates how our social systems aren't designed for a world the size of the internet.

It's a good hunch. The intellectual among us often treat their imaginations as if the imagination is reality, thus neglecting natural--as in nature--limits and boundaries to the human condition. Not everything we can imagine is right, possible, or desirable. Twitter and social media in general are manifestations of this.

I recognize the context of this response, but Twitter can be really great.

I follow a lot of interesting people - as a result my information on Covid was more accurate and months earlier than anything in the main stream press. Sometimes not just 'more accurate', but the main stream press was actively and entirely wrong and a handful of smart people on Twitter were right. [0]

You also can interact with other interesting people, make friends that you can meet in real life (many live in the bay area), learn new things, etc. You can get an accurate sense of where some trends are going.

It can be a great place, but requires a lot of manual curation. Don't engage in culture war, block people often and immediately if they comment in bad faith, curate your feed with friendly people. Don't get drawn into petty emotional arguments. Try to be nice.

[0]: For a recent high quality example: https://twitter.com/Bob_Wachter/status/1404151502864883713

To be fair, the problem is less about the platform or the medium and the simple concept of optimizing for engagement. Regulate advertising to the point where it's less profitable than letting customers pay for services and suddenly the incentives to promote toxicity for engagement's sake disappears.

The problem absolutely is the platform and the medium, because it makes nuanced impossible by design.

Even for as creepy as Kevin Spacey is/was, all accounts of his cancelling are tossed out in court for lack of evidence, or pending his own lawsuits against these people. Netflix really did him dirty throwing him under the bus like they did as have many companies/schools/organizations simply on hearsay alone. It reminds me a lot of the movie Jagten with Mads Mickelson. A whole community despises you and vehemently wants nothing to do with you all based on rumor and speculation. Without even a legitimate means to protect yourself.

That's a very powerful film, everyone should watch it. English title is "The hunt".

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2106476/

> Netflix really did him dirty throwing him under the bus like they did as have many companies/schools/organizations simply on hearsay alone.

Ehm... https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/02/media/house-of-cards-kevin-.... There were eight people working on the "House of Cards" who alleged/confirmed he was predatory. There is of course still a chance that it's one big witch hunt, but this is definitely not a case of 100 Twitter random users making a lot of noise.

...according to someone.

According to a good friend of mine who witnessed it first-hand.

You missed the point. While the entire thread talk about how people can easily accuse others on the internet without evidence, someone posts a link containing accusations and we're supposed to automatically assume it's true.

But hey, now some guy on hacker news says his friend witnessed it...

Sure, I will ask my friend if he wants to write a sworn affidavit and have it notarised. But until then you're just going to have to trust that there are hundreds of people who witnessed Spacey's behaviour.

> But until then you're just going to have to trust that there are hundreds of people who witnessed Spacey's behaviour.

Or you can go to Wikipedia to find a list of accusations (sourced with articles written by journalists) and evaluate whether you find the claims credible based on the journalists/newspapers/people/accusations involved.

I think it's perfectly okay to claim that all of these people involved are lying and it's just a big conspiracy, but at least provide some arguments to this specific case instead of vague "oh, but can we actually trust words on the internet???".

I can do that too for having a mushroom induced trip about being abducted by aliens. Still doesn't make it true and I left out the part that I was tripping on mushrooms but forgot.

Who are “our laws”? Twitter is a global corporation.

It's based in the US in California and is dominated by an English speaking crowd from the US who reflect the values where they come from.

Please let's not swerve into nationalistic flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Nice, so that excuses lack of any regulation of this monstrocity?

I didn't see any libel mentioned in the article. The author seems not to dispute the claims made against him.

He absolutely disputes the allegations of, rape which are at the crux of the his larger cancellation.

> So I wrote up a statement saying I had slept with women at events and sometimes I was a dick. The statement was heavily (and perhaps hastily) worded in an effort to convey my understanding of the gravity of hurting people and my desire to set a good example. The internet, though, misinterpreted some of what I had said and began accusing me of rape. No one has ever accused me of raping them. But twitter latched onto that narrative and couldn’t let it go.

As much as I love anonymity online, the lack of accountability for people doing this stuff is almost a worse evil now that people can hold clout. This sort of stuff should hold people criminally negligent of the use of their personal influence.

I think this fits:

> My womanizing at events predates ever meeting my wife. But people went so far as to call her a rapist, a sex trafficker, or at best a rape apologist.

C’mon. It’s in the 2nd paragraph!

have you actually READ the article?

No, of course not. They just read the tweets about the article.

You never read actual sources! That runs risk of accidently seeing something that contradicts your preconceptions of the facts. Then you'll be stuck having to rationalize away the cognitive dissonance.

He loses work due to false accusations of rape. Wait, you say, they just misinterpreted his words! Well, they also accused his wife.

> The internet, though, misinterpreted some of what I had said and began accusing me of rape. No one has ever accused me of raping them. But twitter latched onto that narrative and couldn’t let it go.

> My womanizing at events predates ever meeting my wife. But people went so far as to call her a rapist, a sex trafficker, or at best a rape apologist. The online world expected her to divorce me and when she didn’t many more people who claimed they would support her, shunned her.

And, depending on what the media actually said:

> I think my low point happened when the story was picked up by some bigger online blogs. Not because they made things worse or that I have any delusions about their journalistic integrity (I was never asked for a comment by any media outlet or blog that shared this story).

People should take note of the parent post's behavior. It is exactly this careless misinterpretation and willful ignorance, amplified through a community, which causes toxic dogpiling.

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