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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

I think you’re confusing “would not be allowed to be made today” with “would face a ~48 hour Twitter outrage cycle then the world would move on”.

I feel like we're stuck in this absurd cycle where the outrage to the outrage becomes a force multiplier. A small number of very vocal people on the left express outrage about X. Not a view shared by the vast majority of the population, left and right included. Right wing media picks up on said outrage and makes vast, sweeping statements about what it means about "the left" and "America today". The whole thing snowballs, some folks on the left end up defending people they don't agree with just because of the outrage on the right... blah blah blah it all eventually dies down until we do the same dance a couple of months later.

It's all an absurd waste of everyone's time, except for the folks like Tucker Carlson that get record viewing figures and a huge pay day from it.

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I mostly agree, and you're spot on about the outrage cycle. Well put.

However, I don't think the outrage cycle is really contained within Twitter, or within social media in general. It also spills over to traditional media, at least to some extent. Since it gets a lot of attention, including sometimes from influential people, it can actually affect the kinds of content that people dare make, especially if financial risks are involved.

What you're "allowed" to do is a bit of an imprecise expression unless you go right down to law, but it would be a little disingenuous to pretend that social pressure doesn't affect what people expect others to find permissible. Getting outrage thrown at you can certainly make people feel something is socially forbidden. (That of course serves a pro-social role as well. But I don't think we're used to the idea that it's normal to have outrage or other strong emotional condemnation towards something we do from random people we don't know unless we've done something totally unacceptable. We're wired to think of social acceptance as important and outrage as something that requires our attention. The way social media works throws us off because of that. But I digress.)

I agree about the description of the outrage cycle, but I think what you're leaving out is people frequently get fired/ostracized for these things. That really does have a cooling effect.

Who got fired for making a movie?

I also think that as more high profile people leave Twitter, the extremes of canceling are going to die down. It's pretty well accepted in the leftist communities that canceling has become more than a bit too impulsive and reductionist (this latter factor, I would suggest, due in part to Twitter's tiny character limits), and I think at this point everyone wants to leave Twitter and be done with it, but it's a technical issue now. Twitter is addicting, and honestly so is the adrenaline rush from knowing some rich guy's day/week was ruined. imo, it's easier to just not think about Twitter when people you know/admire aren't on there, and if you're not thinking, you're not tweeting, and if you're not tweeting, you're not recklessly canceling.

Something should replace it, though. Transparent accountability is good, and I think we'll really need to figure this one out before a tech monolopy takes advantage of it again.

Your conclusion misses the fact that those outraged people move the needle.

Studio Execs are very sensitive to outrage. It's part of the calculus.

Often, the outrage is perpetuated within the industry as well.

That said - Airplane would get made - they'd just adjust the jokes accordingly.

When they made Airplane, there were a lot of gags they didn't use because they just were 'too much' - or not funny.

So adjusting the content a bit is always something going on.

That said, the 'fear bar' is much, much lower for certain formats.

My canary for that is Tina Fey. And Judd Apatow. These are staunchly progressive people, but with serious comedy chops. They have been making some passive aggressive public statements lately with respect to this stuff, you can hear what they think on podcasts.

What we need is for Mel Brooks is to come back and save us. He's too old, but if he backed a Ben Stiller remake of 'Blazing Saddles' - I think it would be the funniest thing of the century.

> except for the folks like Tucker Carlson that get record viewing figures

True, but don't pretend that folks like Samantha Bee or Joy Reid aren't exactly the same thing for the other side.

I'd maybe agree that they occupy similar spaces in their respective media landscapes, though Bee being a comedian already makes her a different proposition. But either way I wouldn't say they are the exact same thing. An example: recently Tucker Carlson recently took time in an episode to detail an entirely unfounded conspiracy theory that the FBI was behind the January 6th Capitol attacks. It was completely and utterly false, and easily proven as such. But he has not (to date) admitted that.

If there are examples of this level of disinformation coming from Samantha Bee and/or Joy Reid I'd be interested to see them.

> Bee being a comedian already makes her a different proposition

That's a bit of a cop-out in some ways, especially depending on how it's meant.

If it's meant to indicate that Samantha Bee uses humor, that's fine. But by the same token, Rush Limbaugh used humor. Ben Shapiro and Stephen Crowder use humor. None of those people do a show with their primary intention being to get a laugh, though. They do a show with their primary intention being to express a point of view, and if they can use humor to do that, all the better.

If it's meant to indicate that we shouldn't take Samantha Bee too seriously, don't worry; I don't. I also don't take Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson too seriously, either.

But usually, it's meant to deflect criticism. Jon Stewart did the same thing. He would make serious criticisms of commentators (including a much younger Tucker Carlson) as if he was trying to be taken seriously, but as soon as anyone criticized him he would immediately fall back to, "I'm a comedian!"

To his credit though, John Oliver (who was on the Daily Show along with Samantha Bee and Stephen Colbert back in the day) doesn't seem to hide behind the "I'm a comedian" shield anymore.

Joy Reid regularly does the same. [0][1][2]

[0] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/06/24/joy_reid_...

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/joy-reid-fact-check-tapper-1546432

[2] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/27/17286392/j...

Samantha Bee is not a talking head being laundered by news outlets into something like reporting.

Who is pretending they can't tell the difference?

Oh how I wish it was contained to Twitter.

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