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Comment by radmuzom | Hacker News Reader

Earlier this year when Richard Stallman was re-instated to the Board of the FSF, there were a lot of tweets expressing dismay. To one of them, I replied that I personally don't think he has done anything wrong at all - and linked to a well-known article by a woman who defended him better than me. While I found some support among a few people, the amount of hate I received shook me a bit. People started adding me to lists like "a list of people who tweet stupid things". It went on for a couple of days. The good thing is that I am a nobody - I am not known in any popular online communities, I am not famous and no one really cares who I am - so I could not be cancelled. But the amount of negative emotions and energy directed at me did affect me for a couple of days. After that event, I sympathize much more with people who have been cancelled (earlier I tended to support those doing the cancelling even though I did not tweet/comment myself).

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Good for you for doing the right thing.

Let me ask you - did you feel like the hate thrown at you on Twitter was completely organic? Was there anything that made you question the motives of the involved Twits?

I ask because the whole smear job vs Stallman felt quite manufactured to me; from the initial Vice article horrifically misquoting him, to the weirdly rabid hate towards anyone defending him on forums like this and Reddit.

Doesn’t it always feel manufactured?

What you are mentioning regarding the case of Stallman’s cancelling is the same pattern I have seen applied against every other voice that has a dissenting opinion of the current culture that dominates social media.

> Doesn’t it always feel manufactured?

No. Spacey, Weinstein, and Epstein, to name a few, felt the opposite of manufactured. Repressed? Those stories took years, or decades to break, even with high profile advocates.

Now, you might say that they didn't have a "dissenting opinion of the social media culture" - but their actions would show otherwise.

None of those characters were individuals who were cancelled based on their opinions against the dominant culture in social media.

Also, they weren’t cancelled, they got charged with one or multiple felonies, which is different, and there are plenty of apologists for their behavior.

For example, this was a real tweet that got taken down.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E32Pup-WEAIhQvz?format=jpg&name=...

I agree that what Stallman said was misrepresented, and perhaps the later stages of the "cancelling" were more manufactured, but the initial anger that popped up on various MIT mailing lists felt very organic to me. A bit mob-like, definitely driven moreso by emotion than a good-faith reading of what Stallman said, and probably amplified by people who disagreed feeling afraid to speak out. But I wouldn't describe any of it as manufactured.

Wasn’t one of the MIT students seeking to strip Stallman of his positions, claiming that she had only heard of him acting inappropriately (as she was too young to ever interact with him herself), yet when challenged on the matter, refused to provide any specifics?

Yes, IIRC the Medium post that made the situation go viral beyond MIT was written by a student that just compiled other peoples' stories about Stallman, not based on any of her own experiences. Personally I can't imagine initiating calls for someone's head without first hand knowledge, but I don't think she had any hidden incentive to make the post. My guess is she had her own negative experiences with someone else in the past and thought she was doing the right thing by speaking out for others here. I recall the post reading as very emotional, like a rant you might send to a private group chat of friends. So definitely not manufactured.

Perhaps you are being too charitable in assuming that the student was calling for Stallman’s head out of past trauma. It could be that the calling for his head was a performative act for her own benefit, boosting her in the eyes of others.

Maybe to the extent that anyone who participates in social justice mobs is being performative, but it definitely did not help her career or result in any material gain. She also had no incentive to take down Stallman specifically, of course she didn't even really know who he was when she made the post. I wouldn't be surprised if she was trying to get a bit of street cred with her in-group, but to me that's just an extremely human, often somewhat subconscious thing. I would be surprised if that was literally the only motivation though - the post comes across as legitimately emotional, not faux outrage.

That doesn't mean she was right to make the post obviously, I just don't think it was any sort of active ploy on her part. I don't even think the anger was fake, from her or most of the initial responders. As it propagated maybe the outrage was more manufactured, but believe me I know people that felt just as heated as she did at the time, only expressed it in private chats. In some cases these were chats with just a handful of friends that had a spectrum of opinions on the issue, so no reason for it to be posturing.

I hate cancel culture, and I understand feeling like some instances are very manufactured. But I feel it is more dangerous when it is organic, because it is very hard to deal with legitimate human emotions. I think usually when the organic mobs misfire it is a "straw breaking the camel's back" type situation: some minor offender becomes the target of pent up rage from a larger issue, and the punishment ends up being way disproportionate for the one, while many others get off scot-free.

>> Perhaps you are being too charitable in assuming that the student was calling for Stallman’s head out of past trauma. It could be that the calling for his head was a performative act for her own benefit, boosting her in the eyes of others.

A lot of people who do the later actually have unresolved trauma issues. It's just harder for people to empathize with them because of their behaviour. The claim in psychology is that narcissistic people are actually using that to protect a deeply fragile ego. But then maybe psychologists just want to say everyone suffers from the same thing. We'd all be peace loving, sharing, commie hippies by default if nobody screwed us up ;-)

It felt organic but more FAANG centric than, say, broadly OSS centric to me.

There's no detectable difference between manufactured and organic "canceling" because the major component in both cases is a horde of people who are just looking for a hate bandwagon to hop on.

Likewise if you are publishing to Vice or some other moderately popular publication, you're directly motivated to stir up drama both for clickbait and as a form of a personal power trip against those you don't like for whatever reason.

The main issue is that our internet culture is extremely primitive. We're basically animals online, most of us. And it's very easy to spur a stampede and destroy someone, whether intentionally or not.

> from the initial Vice article horrifically misquoting him, to the weirdly rabid hate towards anyone defending him on forums like this and Reddit

In fairness those are both very common features of cancellations. Another that comes to mind is Damore, who never wrote what most people attributed to him. I've had perfectly clear for a long time that even smart people will misunderstand the clearest statement if it's what it's socially expected from them.

I think there are also some topics where people are conditioned to respond emotionally. Once responding emotionally of course a fair reading is out the window.

I do think there is a lot of silence due to social expectations, also probably many of the likes/shares with little additional commentary come from such expectations. But IME the people that write the long rants tearing X person apart are either legitimately upset, or have an agenda way beyond trying to fit social expectations.

Of course you can't have mob justice without both the instigators and the larger crowd giving passive support. But I don't think it's accurate to assume it's purely people wanting to fit in. Many of the cases that gain traction have an emotional core.

> the people that write the long rants tearing X person apart are either legitimately upset, or have an agenda way beyond trying to fit social expectations

These would be the activists who are- as you call them- the instigators, and who might be close to the origin of the events. But the second level is the media- and here you have journalists and bloggers, who are already far removed from the original events and are supposed to report them to a wider audience in a neutral way. And yet you see them grossly misreporting the content of text they have read and that anyone can check: despite much less direct emotional involvement here (if there is any it should be acknowledged and balanced), and the fact that a news article takes much more effort and focus than a simple retweet.

So the justification for the spread of obviously false information can only be either an actual wilful dishonesty (and I don't believe it) or it's nothing else than a selective blindness driven by an instinctive desire to align to the immediate peers.

Is the media driven by aligning with peers? Or is it driven by putting out the story that will maximize clicks/engagement?

Many good points in the discussion below. However, when one of Stallman’s “crimes” was comparing US laws against that of Sudan (as mentioned in the open letter), I could not help but feel that people are looking for an opportunity to take him down for reasons other than his views on Minsky, adolescent sex, etc.

> I am not known in any popular online communities, I am not famous and no one really cares who I am - so I could not be cancelled

Be very careful with that outlook. When I think of cancel culture I always come back to Justine Sacco[0]. She was a nobody with 170 twitter followers before the mob destroyed her life.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-t...

The whole Stallman thing was a shit show, and I think he was thrown off the board for all the wrong reasons. I was still glad so see him go, simply because FSF was a better organization without him.

But yeah, the railroading that he got was wrong.

He should have been removed simply because he has become an obstacle. The FSF does a lot of good things, but occasionally they do dumb things, and it seems (I could be wrong) that the dumb things come down to assuaging Stallman's ego.

Sounds like another round of thought-crime and obsessive reactions to stamp it out, a la McCarthyism, etc.

Reminds me of a great ST:TNG episode "The Drumhead" with Jean Simmons as an admiral, who goes on a conspiracy witchhunt. Not until the proceedings go off the rails does anyone have the confidence to resist.

It is a bit of a different category since it is regarding organizations or government, but I believe the angry, obsessive mob angle is the same.

This is great example why pseudonymous commentary is often essential to honest discourse.

I also believe that sometimes it'd be better if judge's name wasn't known

e.g in cases like Derek's Chauvin (police officer / G. Floyd)

The deal with cancel culture is power, if you're canceling Joe Schmo, or if you keep canceling someone well after they've lost everything, well then that's just bullying.

Yeah Twitter is very toxic. I got on a few lists as well.

I tried to talk to the NZ civil liberties association about freedom of speech. As it turns out they are against free speech and pro hate speech laws. I didn't know that going in. Then some people put me on a hate speech list. After that I was blocked by a large group of people I'd never encountered.

It's a weird place and I'm glad to be off the platform.

NZ Twitter is nuts. If you think US Twitter leans left you haven't seen anything like NZPol Twitter.

I completely believe that whatever happened to you was totally unreasonable, but try to understand that from another person's point of view, the broad "you must be against freedom of speech" thing is "toxic", just as you have experienced "toxic" behavior from the opposite side of the issue.

I'm not saying being against freedom of speech is toxic. I'm saying getting put on a hate speech list for being pro freedom of speech is.

I've had great discussions with friends and family that disagree with me on free speech.

On Twitter people don't seem to treat each other as people, but as representatives of a given ideology.

I understand all that, and agree. Separately, I'm saying that labeling people on one side of this issue as "against free speech" is a common quip, and is also toxic. It's similar to labeling pro-choice people as pro-murder.

I expect people on Twitter to fall into that hole, and I don't engage with Twitter for that reason. I have more respect for HN users. For example, the sibling to this reply refers to me, saying "These people are a lost cause. They cannot be convinced of the value of free speech." I'd like to keep sentiments like that at bay here, and I have hope for that (see the fact that the comment I'm referring to is dead).

Ah, I see now. Sorry I didn't understand that when I replied. On re-reading your comment, that is on me. You were clear.

Sorry if that term offends I didn't realize it did.

Here we don't have "Free Speech." As such, we have freedom of expression in our bill of rights. "Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form." So to use the term "Free Speech" in New Zealand can be seen as an attempt to advocate for an American version of free speech. Many are actively against that.

That said, I'm sure many simply want to place new boundaries on speech and feel the result still maintains free speech. To them, I can see how it would be offensive to be accused of being against free speech.

Also, thank you for your willingness to get to the bottom of this. You have opened my eyes to how my comment could have been read. HN is a much better environment.

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