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Comment by theHIDninja | Hacker News Reader

You are saying that publicly shaming someone, making them lose their current job and making them un-hirable is a fair punishment for making an off-color joke, or holding beliefs that even slightly differ from Twitter's collective, or any number of innocuous things that people have had their lives ruined over.

Cancel culture IS a problem. You are part of the problem for not acknowledging it.

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These arguments always attribute causality to someone with very little agency in those situations and minimize/victimize the actions of someone who did something problematic.

Let’s walk through it…

Person A says something bad (your ‘off color joke’)

Person B dislikes that and says so on the internet, loudly

Person C sees what B said and decides not to hire A

Your argument is that B is more responsible for Cs actions than A or C is. This particular brand of American individual freedoms is bought into by one end of our political spectrum in particular and is nonsense.

My argument is that Twitter is 100% complicit and aware of what person B does, as well as the consequences of it (in this case, indirectly murdering someone). This phenomenon of ruining multiple people's lives in this fashion is also almost entirely localized to Twitter.

This is why I believe Twitter should be forcibly shut down. Their entire business model depends on them memory holing the atrocities its users commit.

"Cancel culture" is nothing. We've long warned about how privacy online, using pseudonyms and being conscious of the data you present to others. If you're saying something that platform users dislike, they're probably going to stop engaging with it or dogpile the topic. It's a reality distortion field, a cause with no effect.

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