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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

> How do we neuter the power of Twitter mobs?

Stop listening to them?

EDIT: That's especially effective since the Twitter mobs keep moving targets every couple of weeks anyway. They don't have any patience.

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The power they have isn’t over us, it’s over institutions and businesses who seem to bend to the will of the mob.

I’d like to see some data on whether a Twitter storm in a teacup has any measurable negative consequences for a typical large organization, and whether they need to listen as often as they do.

The more decoupled an organization's or its leaders' incentives are from the "market" - the more risk averse they become. Everything is about keeping your head down and avoiding controversy.

The goal for many orgs now is not to make customers happy anymore, it's to avoid the ire of a small group, and keep rent seeking.

As we move towards post-capitalism this will only get worse.

Nobody ever got fired for canceling a controversial speaker

This is basically the problem, as I see it.

On one hand, keep the speaker. The potential downside: social media outrage that may escalate and get covered on MSM if it gets big enough. You and your dept / uni get a lot of bad press or if things go really sideways, your job could be on the line.

The potential upside of this decision? People go to a talk and consider some issues, but it’s not like you (the committee / administrator / dean etc) get any real tangible incentive from this outcome. You basically just did your job, if you’re lucky, everyone just moves on.

On the other hand, cancel the speaker. The upside: MSM will congratulate you or ignore it, but regardless, you’ll be seen as making the “right” decision by most people you interact with. Some free speech types (a dying breed it seems) might get upset but they don’t seem to have much power over the general public’s perception or decisions about firing made by the university.

So the decision is obvious and it’s the one that gets made time and time again. And it’s the way the Twitter mobs continue to hold sway, especially because so much of the MSM lives on Twitter.

A similar rubric occurs in a large corporation by the C suite. Once the mob forms, there is everything to lose and almost nothing to lose by taking a stand on an issue seen as unwoke. If this is to change, incentives need to change, mainly creating disincentives for cowardly execs / deans and incentives for those who make principled and/or courageous stands.

(None of this is a carte blanche endorsement against activism, it’s just to say that there are reasons that no one stands up against Twitter mobs and we may want to explore ways to change this dynamic unless we desire a future ruled by mobs)

They should.

They don't have any power, other than to annoy the institution. The only power here is the power that MIT has over the people they book to speak, and since MIT doesn't want to be annoyed, they canceled the speaker.

The problem with cancel culture is a problem with bad employment law, and a problem with cultural institutions without any core ethical beliefs.

The paradox of ethical relativism. Seems to run parallel with the paradox of tolerance.

I agree. Absolutionistic ethics, of which I am a proponent of, would largely throw out “the paradox of tolerance”.

Cancel culture serves to highlight the inevitable orthodoxies that arise from proponents of “the paradox of tolerance”. Ultimately people need to ask themselves, “By what standard?”

> They don't have any power, other than to annoy the institution. The only power here is the power that MIT has over the people they book to speak, and since MIT doesn't want to be annoyed, they canceled the speaker.

The ability to get others to do what you want them to is absolutely a form of power.

I can't believe that Twitter culture has this much power but they're using it all on cancelling MIT speakers and not even trying to improve US policy.

mobs aren't known for being logical

It’s Brownian-cancel culture, a random walk of cancels just to see what happens…

They don’t have any power over the government or the average US voter. They only have power over random corporate employees and universities.

A large number of US universities make signing a DEI statement a precondition for employment. Some also require an annual progress report on DEI targets. Dorian Abbot had the temerity to propose an alternate framework, MFE. Some factions can't tolerate alternative perspectives, and thus Dorian had to be cancelled.

https://www.newsweek.com/diversity-problem-campus-opinion-16...

It’s about postmodern deconstruction. Tearing everything down will make everything better. Somehow.

It would be good to pass laws that make it illegal to fire someone over a twitter mob (or any kind of mob action). Anti-mob or anti-bullying laws. And/or initiate class-action lawsuits against twitter for encouraging this kind of behavior or failing to prevent it, resulting in significant damage to people's careers. It's far from being the first time this happens, so there's definitely a case to be made that twitter has known for a long time that this is a problem.

Edit: changed the choice of words.

Yes, it is largely a labor law issue. Twitter mob is not just cause for terminating the employment of someone. Using anti-defamation laws against individual bullies is another possibility.

In general, in the US, there doesn't need to be a "just cause." Someone has become a headache or embarrassment for us--for whatever unprotected reason--is sufficient.

It is much more complicated when someone is tenured, and there was a reason academics were protected by that (but it is thinning now).

Right. Hence, "in general." Getting rid of a tenured faculty member is much trickier than getting rid of some junior corporate employee.

In the US sodomy was a crime too. Laws can change. Labour law is not written in stone.

And even with current laws, where there "need not be a just cause", there are protections against unjust causes (e.g. because they found out you're jewish, or you're fat, or whatever) and "because a mob campaigned against one" can be added to that. "But, under current law the business could just say they fired them for their own neutral reasons?" Sure. Let them defend that in a lawsuit, if it happened to coincide with a mob campaign.

But there is than the next obstacle in the US system: You need to have very deep pockets to actually take a case in court. "Justice" is only available to the rich in the US. (And this doesn't seem to be a construction error if you look closer. But that's another topic).

Other countries have unions that will handle those cases for the laid-off employee. Doesn't work perfectly but it's another idea worth considering.

> "Justice" is only available to the rich in the US.

I disagree. I think we can all agree the government has a monopoly on violence which it is relatively inclined to use. The US system depends on the idea that someone will challenge the use of that monopoly in their particular instance, which we call precedent. It is true that people not-of-means may be subject to that violence unjustly but it only takes the government messing with the wrong person once to establish precedent. The wrong person could be rich but they could also just be a person who catches public support.

>but it only takes the government messing with the wrong person once to establish precedent.

Kind of like the case of police routinely shooting unarmed blacks and getting off scot-free?

This system seems to have worked wonders to prevent this from happening. Or maybe they just haven't messed with the wrong person yet, since Rodney King hardly changed anything, and Derek Chauvin's convinction wont either...

> Kind of like the case of police routinely shooting unarmed blacks and getting off scot-free?

That's not quite the same. Murder didn't need precedent, however, establishing some framework for grading police incidents retroactively does. What gets in the way of that is existing laws which protect police officers wholesale. If you're trying overturn an entire existing law for a new framework, that's a bit outside the bounds of precedent because you're not longer talking about interpretation.

And what about twitter mobs that point out legitimate fireable offenses (like police brutality )? Would the fact that a twitter mob raised the issue help prevent the legitimatw firing?

You're arguing for something that in all likelihood requires a constitutional amendment.

Anti discrimination clauses only overrule the first amendments freedom of association due to the equal protection clause, and there's no reading that suggests that firing someone due to public pressure is implicitly discrimination.

Probably not a large organization, but plenty for a small to medium one. The case of Tripwire Interactive is a good recent case study.

Institutions and especially businesses have always bent to the will of the mob when it is cheap or even profitable to do so.

The only time they don’t is when it costs something.

It's not that simple. We have a collective action problem. The first mover sticks out like a sore thumb (or tall poppy) and takes all the heat from the mob. If everyone simultaneously became sensible and simultaneously refused to bend to the mob, the problem would go away, but it's difficult for heterogeneous agents to coordinate in this way. Being brave and taking the first step entails a lot of private cost and a lot of public benefit, which is why so few choose to do it.

Exactly. Considering Twitter accounts and likes and retweet’s can be bought amplifying a particular message might only represent less than 10 actual people.

Additionally I’ve never discussed with someone in real life, person to person, about a single Twitter “cancelation” effort. If these issues were truly significant, they would engage the (actual) media, engage (in this case) with official university complaint systems, etc.

These things take more time and effort than retweeting a hashtag though, and most people won’t follow through with it. Which tells me they’re really not all that bothered about it in the first place.

Seems like a very simple solution. I struggle to see any material effect to MIT had they simply ignored these complainers.

Many such cases. That's why we need to look more closely at why the professional administrative class so eagerly does the wishes of activist mobs.

Could it be that the activists and the administrators believe the same things?

Or the admin feel like they are taking the easiest way out? But if I was an admin, the easier thing would be to ignore it.

I thought it was because, if the mob doesn't get their way, they single out the 'admins' as the next target. At least that's what I remember before I cut out on following twitter as a first party platform.

It's very conceivable, but I haven't seen any examples in a long time, if ever.

That could be part of it. According to surveys the administrators are very left-wing, even more than the professors who are already almost completely left-wing themselves.

Yeah. Over the years I've seen a number of incidents where (someone in) the Harvard administration assumes that the student body, professors, and alumni universally share their view that Affirmative Action is an unquestionable good and then gets caught off guard when this turns out not to be the case.

They do the wishes of right-wing activist mobs, too, and the original victims of campus "cancel culture" were Palestinians.

Could it be that the administrators believe in nothing?

Or administrators don’t want the mob’s fight to be amplified into mainstream national news. I’m sure this would upset donors.

I had the same thought. Maybe the mob is just the excuse the administrators can point to to do what they wanted to do already. Perhaps they both understand their role.

Exactly. To quote Dave Chappelle, out of context to avoid further debate...

"...they dragged me on Twitter. Well I don't give a fuck because Twitter isn't a real place."

Well, what if Netflix had comments and likes?

IIRC, Netflix used to have voting until Amy Schumer's special was mass downvoted. Comments wouldn't be practical I guess. But I'd imagine his opinion would be the same, really.

Precisely.

Just because you have a Twitter account doesn’t mean your ideas or opinions are well thought out, rationale or even coherent.

I would argue the opposite is the case. What political opinion expressible in less than 500 characters can be worth listening to?

To people with a facile, grade-school understanding of the world, 500 characters is plenty.

To quote[1] Dave Chappelle- 'Twitter's not a real place.'

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS-E6VtD_rE

I don't understand why this isn't the norm. It seems obvious that if you ignore them, they'll go away. But nobody's trying it.

It's possible to assume that most twitter mobs are harmless and insignificant.

The problem is that once in a while, the twitter mobs becomes the yellow jackets.

So you need a way to jauge how likely it is that the keyword-activists will get up over a particular topic.

>Stop listening to them?

You can, but institutions and businesses won't. That's the entire problem.

Use the same Twitter mob to target and destroy the spineless administrators what made the decision in the first place.

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