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Comment by savant_penguin | Hacker News Reader

I'd guess this has something to do with the constant use of force.

Don't want to take the vaccine? We'll find a way to make you

Disagree with me politically on Twitter? We'll look for your employer and coerce him into firing you

Stay two weeks at home, by the way stay in two more weeks and it's been two years. Some places even had curfews (but then if it's a BLM protest we'll ignore the existence of the virus)

We follow the science! (Except if the scientist disagrees with you. Check the interview with Don lemon and Sanjay Gupta when he's about to make a point about Joe Rogan. Lemon cuts him off and wont let him finish)

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This. I was a lifelong Democrat, but no longer. I am still gobsmacked with how they abandoned free speech, the working class, bodily autonomy, and turned science into religion. They've been captured by the Twitter laptop class.

Why is this comment being flagged?

It was [flagged] it was [dead] which sometimes happens on new accounts for reasons I don’t quite understand.

I thought it was to discourage throwaways, but others have noted they’ve created throwaways without the “auto-dead” behavior.

Why do people pretend that what they call "cancel culture" is new and hasn't been pushed by lots of groups for decades? The religious right used it all the time after all.

While "cancelling" as a phenomenon isn't new, the methods and scope of what constitutes modern "cancel culture" is much more vicious and far-reaching than mere ostracism or the oft-referenced "showing someone the door".

Projects like this have been going on for years https://www.professorwatchlist.org/

As a conservative-leaning person, I've pondered this juxtaposition before and come to the following conclusion:

The religious right says, "We don't like what Disney/Home Depot/Google/etc. are doing, and so we're telling all of our friends to boycott them if they also hold those values".

"Cancel culture" says, "We don't like what you, Joe Schmoe, are doing. As a result, we're going to tell Disney/Amazon/Google/etc. to boycott you and make you unemployable."

This doesn't seem accurate. For example, The Dixie Chick backlash involved listeners calling radio stations and telling them to blacklist their music[1]:

> The Dixie Chicks were blacklisted by thousands of country radio stations. On May 6, Colorado radio station KKCS suspended two DJs for playing their music. WTDR-FM in Talladega, Alabama, dropped the Dixie Chicks after more than 250 listeners called on a single day to complain about Maines's comments.

That's not to mention the baying for blood that happened in the early 2000s when anyone came out against the Iraq War[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks_controversy

[2] http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2...

Yes, those events happened but that was over 20 years ago at this point. I often see people utilizing an argument that either minimizes/trivializes modern cancel culture by invoking either "conservatives did this in the past, just look at when they got mad at [x]" or "this is actually what conservatives have been doing the whole time". Yet, whenever I see examples like the one you have posted, they seem far more mild than some of the recent cancellations that seek to un-person someone.

Groups like the Family Research Council, Concerned Women of America, and others routinely call for boycotts and "canceling" of individuals they do not like.

The FRC once even called for a boycott of Chick-fil-A in 2019 https://townhall.com/columnists/toddstarnes/2019/11/29/famil...

They do this sort of thing often.

> The religious right used it all the time after all.

I'm not sure about the accuracy of this, but it is attempting to use past bad behavior to justify current bad behavior.

You can't change the past. You can do something about what's happening right now. A lot of rational people want to cancel "cancel culture" right now because of the harm it inflicts on society.

They boycotts and such by those orgs are happening right now, it isn't something happening in the past.

> Why do people pretend that what they call "cancel culture" is new and hasn't been pushed by lots of groups for decades?

The whole reason the term “cancel culture” was coined was to give right-wing rants about the troubling new trend of “political correctness” a veneer of novelty; it's literally the same complaints from the Right (about things the Right does just as much, but based on different ideological orthodoxy) that have been being made since the 1980s, but with a new label swapped in to the old complaints, because complaining about a new trend for 4 decades starts to show that, whatever the basis of your complaint is, it's not a disturbing new trend.

> Disagree with me politically on Twitter? We'll look for your employer and coerce him into firing you

It seems really weird to blame the Democratic party for this or Democrats as a whole since this is completely unrelated to the government or administration or elected Democrat officials.

Electing Republicans won't "fix" this for you at all.

> Don't want to take the vaccine? We'll find a way to make you

For interest's sake, are you consistent in wanting to remove all vaccine requirements, including for things like the measles vaccine?

Except that nearly 100% of political donations from Twitter employees go to Democrats, so it is Democrat-aligned people making the decision about who get silenced and who gets high visibility on Twitter, which influences the extremists that try to get people fired. Heck, Democrat politicians have directly advocated this sort of activity, including physical violence.

Electing Republicans might get Section 230 updated to require platforms to be platforms and not a mix of all the benefits of platforms and none of the downsides of being publishers that are not neutral in silencing certain perspectives.

Section 230 has nothing to do with the whole "cancellation" stuff. You still haven't mentioned anything that would result in less "cancellation" if Republicans were in power.

Also, I don't know why you are so eager to prevent platforms from performing moderation. Section 230 is quite simple, it means that social media companies can moderate without being responsible for their user's content. No free social media company can feasibly moderate all of their user's content, the math simply doesn't work out in terms of moderation effort per dollar in advertising revenue. Companies would have to stop moderating. The removal of 230 would lead to the total destruction of social media in the tech industry as consumers don't want to go on unmoderated platforms like 4chan.

A lot of this anti-230 stuff feels like 4chan users angry that the general public doesn't like 4chan and are thus demanding that the government ban all of 4chan's competitors.

> A lot of this anti-230 stuff feels like 4chan users angry that the general public doesn't like 4chan and are thus demanding that the government ban all of 4chan's competitors.

It doesn't just feel like it, Republicans passing state-level “lets try to work around 230” laws have had them enjoined on First Amendment grounds supported by their explicit statements of pretty much exactly the attitude you describe as the motivation for the laws.

> Except that nearly 100% of political donations from Twitter employees go to Democrats, so it is Democrat-aligned

Yes, because we live in a market-socialist utopia where the giant firms that dominate the economy are controlled by democratic vote of their workers, not some dystopian system, let’s call it “equitism”, where society is organized around the interests of and firms are run by equity owners who generally are not the same people as the workers.

And also in a world where campaign spending is entirely by official campaigns with disclosed donors, not by notionally independent groups spending unlimited money with no requirement for tracking and reporting expenditures or donations.

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