I sometimes see posts that I like and want to retweet but I don't because it means I'm endorsing everything the author has ever said or ever will say. It's not worth the risk.
People in my demographic face significant exposure to "cancelling" or ambushing for wrongthink. So it's best for me to avoid it entirely.
I was lightly burned by a tweet (of my own authoring) once, and I thought "I make $XYZ per year, twitter pays me nothing, this joke tweet caused me a lot of stress, the odds that being on twitter will get me cancelled will cost me $XYZ are non-zero and I don't control them"
Then I deleted all my tweets and my twitter account (8 years ago) and life has been really nice without it!
To illustrate this: imagine your ideal day. It could be on vacation, or hanging out at home, anywhere really. The key: imagine you are happy, or at least content. Now, do your imaginings ever have you reading angry tweets by people you hardly know for longer than you'd like?
I'd guess not.
Not sure how you could do that job without Twitter.
Why would you do this to yourself? I mean if you are a balanced adult who knows what they want in life and are not affected by massive mood swings and insecurities for whatever reason.
It is of course not black and white, it seems that ie right now Ukrainian defenders have a very good platform to inform whole world, no need to have BBC/CNN guys embedded in the heart of bombed city. That's cool and all. I just really don't like the rest of the whole society evolved around it.
Twitter feeds directly into the modern impulse to define oneself. It becomes sticky by coupling that with social validation. Say the right thing and you get a few Internet Points. Do it enough and people may follow you, which gives you a different type of Internet Points. Get enough of those, and you might get a blue checkmark, denoting you as a Very Important Person.
It is much easier to lean on externally mediated processes of identity formation (like Twitter) than it is to go at it alone. I almost don't blame people, except for the fact that I don't believe this outsourcing of identity even works on an individual level. It's as if everyone present is playing along with a game that they don't fully believe in, but the game goes on despite that.
It's quite modern and tragicomic in a way.
Just evict such absolutist moral nonsense people from your life and don’t allow them to control you. When you see them do it to others, block them.
It’s exactly the same thing as when it was a certain sort of church people controlling much of society with fear of “canceling” which was just done by different people with different means in the past, fundamentally nothing changed when people left religion because they thought religion was the source of this kind of toxicity.
I don't use Twitter or pretty much say anything publicly for the same reason, but note that this is definitely a risk for people of all demographics.
If you have a minority viewpoint, you get attacked far more easily.
Right now or at any point in the future. People have been canceled for things they said many years and opinion changes ago.
We have gone from silencing the minority to silencing the majority, this is terrible, but silver lining is that now maybe more people are invested in solving the problem.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30602611
I would reiterate my comment on that thread, verbatim:
Very few people spoke there, and very little of what they said was distributed beyond Hyde Park or recorded for posterity. I'm lucky enough to have seen a couple of people speak there, and they were both rather... eccentric. And even they didn't stand there all day, every day giving their opinions on everything that happened.
I don’t believe in living in fear of how people might react.
Of course I choose my battles; and I don’t walk up to strangers and tell them their baby is ugly. But that’s not being suppressed, IMHO.
And I don’t keep narrow-minded people among my close friends.
I can’t even risk having people see who I follow, and on Twitter who you follow is public.
It seems in their effort to ban people for wrong think, they banned the wrong group. They should have been banning the cancellers. "I don't engage on Twitter out of fear," is not a good sign for retention or growth numbers. Twitter seems to be killing itself by allowing this cancer to grow.
Have you ever been on a pretty great message board / forum and a bunch of spittle people join and makes the board suck to converse on? Eventually that board is nothing but spittle people, then the board dies. Twitters seems like it is going this way.
FWIW, I cancelled all my social media accounts after the Snowden revelations in 2013. I'm just an outside observer, but I'm certainly glad I'm not inside.
> it means I'm endorsing everything the author has ever said or ever will say.
> People in my demographic face significant exposure to "cancelling" or ambushing for wrongthink.
I totally get that this is the zeitgeist now (and I'm starting to behave this way now on HN since I don't really do other social media), but this is a horrible place we've worked ourselves into.
People taking pop shots and then getting algorithmically amplified has reduced the surface area for having safe dialogue and has led to increasing tensions and polarization.
In an ideal world, people talk about and discuss things they disagree about frequently and are at least respectful in dealing with those they don't see eye to eye with. We all have a different frame of reference, and that's not something to fight against.
I think the pandemic increased stresses for a lot of people (myself included), but these trends really took hold with algorithmic amplification. It isn't just a passing fad, sadly. And it isn't just rooted in just the technology. There are real needs and causes for social angst that need to be met.
Imagine if we also amplified inspiring and hopeful things. Nourished ourselves with stories of hope and overcoming difficulties. Science and technology, opportunity, a look to the future. (Especially for kids!) I know life isn't all sunshine and roses, but this would give us balance and perspective and wouldn't chip away at a person's inner drive and passion by replacing it with skepticism and dissatisfaction.
I think we can swing back. People are noticing this and feeling displeasure.
Turns out, there's a lot of stuff people just probably shouldn't broadcast.
Good decision.
To win the social media game it is to not play it at all.
This is very common on Twitter. It's not a place I can haphazardly navigate. I can't stay up to date on the latest outrage or who has fallen from glory.
It doesn't matter what their views are. If someone decides they don't like them and that person have enough followers, they will find something.
That's an insane premise, but even if we presume it to be true, it still doesn't cover the case of _future_ cancellation when someone finds your tweets 10 years later and decides they aged like milk.
There are many comments I would have made 5-10 years ago, that I wouldn't make today. Sure, that's mostly due to maturity, but I've also adjusted my self-filter to account for a changing environment and audience.
At this point, I write all political comments under pseudonyms. It's not because I'm scared of getting cancelled — on the contrary, I wish I could argue my positions from my real name. But there is a lot of risk, for little benefit – I'm not a "journalist" or blogger or anyone with a career that depends on my political viewpoints. So why bother?
In general, online political comments gain me nothing, and there is no way to predict how those comments might look in a week, month, or even years from now. I do still write plenty of them, under pseudonyms (like this one), but it's more of a hobby to practice my writing. But I'm also not ashamed of anything I've written under any of the accounts – I would gladly defend all my opinions in person (to those close to me, who already know my feelings, and – btw, because they're sane – have never "cancelled" me).
Who knows, maybe one day I'll even tweet my pseudonym usernames so I can show everyone how right I was five years ago.
Case in point: James Gunn ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gunn#Firing_from_Disney_... )
This is why I rarely interact on Twitter and I have a script that deletes all my tweets that are over X days old. If I say something truely insightful, I'll just make a blog post out of it.
Yep, he's super cancelled. Great example.
A good person who doesn't use Twitter (someone who might fix cars, or works on a fishing vessel for example) who is having this little discussion about what is "good" and "ok" might very easily use the wrong words and offend someone.
That’s the real problem: the standards of “good” and “decent” shift from time to time. What is fine today may get you canceled tomorrow.
Thus, it is not safe to put your opinions out there in any form that could come back to bite you. If you want to take that risk, fine. But do not pretend that it is safe.
It's not easy as "hurt" is not objective, is relative to others and no longer connected to intention.
But you might not care about that. You might say that I'm arguing in bad faith, or that your words couldn't possibly have offended me. But you don't get to redefine it.
Obviously, you might just not care that you've just offended me. That's what bad people do. You aren't a bad person, right? Could you please apologize?
This is an unfair question, not because it's not a reasonable one given your argument, but because if you say 'yes' I can't take you seriously.
Of course, that's not really the issue. The issue is what the response is when people are offended. I can certainly modify my language and behavior to reduce the chances of offending someone. I can even apologize when I've accidentally put my foot in my mouth.
Twitter lacks the tolerance and nuance for either of those scenarios, though. If something 'not ok' is said, what was intended or meant doesn't matter (and any nuanced is typically ignored). An apology isn't seen as an apology for a mistake, but as an admission of guilt of being a terrible person who doesn't deserve oxygen.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes...
https://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-show/soap/
> Though the show’s ratings were still good in season four, ABC cancelled the series because of continued pressure from the so-called “moral majority.” By the end of the series, Vlasic pickles was the only advertiser interested in advertising on the series. In They’ll Never Put That on the Air, executive producer Paul Junger Witt said, “We weren’t killed by a fearful network. The network had been incredibly supportive. We had been doing this long enough to understand that they were in a business, and they sat down and showed us — dollar for dollar — why they couldn’t afford to do it anymore.”
The people who are part of cancel culture now are literally using the same scare tactics that were used to suppress and oppress homosexuals and other minority groups.
More like people who complain about being victim of the cancel culture are the ones who were oblivious to it until they became the victim. Currently the cancel culture is being associated as some kind of PC culture outcome but it originated way before. The push back or critisim against it seems to be only happening now.
In many scenarios canceling is completely arbitrary, based on misquotes, lack of context, or total fabrication simply because someone, somewhere was offended and can get other people to act on their behalf.
In the best case scenario, the person being canceled is actually a shitty human being. I know such a person. He said some really stupid stuff online, was called out on it, doubled down on it, was doxxed and canceled. He's not the type of person who considers the consequences of his actions in any scenario. He's also actually stupid and not a friend of mine. I think he's as close to hot garbage as a human being can get without actually abusing or murdering other people.
However, this person still did not deserve death threats for the words he wrote. This person did not deserve people calling his employer threatening to burn down their building. The employer certainly didn't deserve that. His coworkers didn't deserve it. This person did not deserve his house to be vandalized; nor did the actual owner of the house. His roommates didn't deserve to live in fear and to have to deal with angry people maybe thinking they were him.
These behaviors are not justifiable. They are, in fact, less justifiable than someone saying awful things online. Writing them off as "consequences" is simply twisted.
Choose to believe it or not, that's your business, but this is exactly what happened.
(I do believe you. By comment was in response to your original one, which lacked a lot of the context you just provided.)
There's enough pile-on mobs on Twitter now with enough disagreement on what's acceptable that you can trip over any of them.
"You just used 'OK' in your comment, only white supremacists use 'OK'."
"He has a racist smirk"
I remember(maybe mis-) some reddit comments at the time about the kid's smirk. There was also a buch of comments about "punchable face"
https://medium.com/@RevolutionaryId/twitter-democratizing-mo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2019_Lincoln_Memorial_...
>In the wake of the publication of the longer video, CNN Business reporter Donie O'Sullivan described the twitter video uploaded by "2020fight" as the one that "helped frame the news cycle" of the previous days, and characterized the video as a "deliberate attempt" to mislead and "manipulate the public conversation on Twitter"—a violation of Twitter rules.[76] According to Molly McKew, an information warfare researcher, the tweet had been boosted by a network of anonymous Twitter accounts to amplify the story.
To add to my point of 'OK': On January 22, shortly after tweeting it, comedian Kathy Griffin deleted a Twitter message in which she accused Covington basketball players making an OK gesture of "throwing up the new nazi sign".
heres one link. search term is covington kid.
basically just another case of left aligned news stations casually labelling everyone they don't like as 'racist'
Someone edited down a video of what happened and shared it. It was boosted either by bots or by unsuspecting people but it set off what can only be described as a witch hunt. This is of course not the first time this has happened, we have had things like Donglegate(https://arstechnica.com/staff/2013/03/donglegate-is-classic-...) and Shirtgate(https://time.com/3589392/comet-shirt-storm/). But the events seem to be getting bigger in magnitude, i.e. drawing in international media(https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46935701) and more numerous(sorry no stats, only my attention).
You can not run a society on mobs. I am not sure if it is Twitters design, the speed of information, the need to feel like part of the in group and/or a combination of all and more that is leading to the formation of mobs but it is not healthy.
I also think there is some cultural values at play as well, where the number of Twitter followers, being an influencer, or just being self centered is seen as a positive thing.
Part of me thinks that it might be related to the gamification of everything, if I post more more(of the right thing) I get more likes, followers, retweets by celebrity. Rather than if I post clear concise or well thought out things. Quality over quantity as it were.
Just like you're getting downvotes and a lot of blowback for your opinion on this matter here, it's way worse on twitter.
I've heard someone say that twitter is a game where the goal is not to be the main character of the day. And that kind of holds. Twitter is a bit geared for outrage. Small snippets with no context. Say you don't like The Batman and you could find yourself under a barrage of hate and vitriol. It's not a left thing or a right thing, they both have their mobs on twitter, in addition to all the other random mobs floating about. Hell, say something shitty about the wrong product will have that mob after you.
if you say internet communities have an issue with pile on mobs and harassment, id agree but i think that's different then canceling, which i don't think happens to the average person or they even need to worry about
Is banning cancelling? What about HN's rate limiting? Being harrassed off of a platform?
All these things have been called "cancelling" by someone. And fair play by others. I think, in this context, we do have to consider the mobs as a part of "cancelling" because this is a thread about an article about people who don't engage in social media. Partly due to the fear of the amount of negative engagement.
I think you've really highlighted here why there's so much backlash against the latest wave of political correctness.
To many people, myself included, a "good person" is someone who can be counted on to help a friend in need, goes out of their way to make the day of the people they interact with that little bit more special (this is something I need to work on), and works hard to provide for their family in whatever way they can.
In my experience at least, a lot of the people who say the right words and hold the right opinions will flake on a friend in their hour of need, or avoid speaking with certain kinds of people lest they say the wrong thing. On the contrary, I can name several people who have dark senses of humour or right-wing beliefs, but will always go above and beyond to help out their community and the people they care about (yes, LGBT people and ethnic minorities too!).
I'm not saying that PC people are worse than non-PC people (if anything, it's probably uncorrelated), but the fact that you've binned people into "good" and "bad" based on how PC their opinions are is just, at least in my opinion, completely out of step with the view of general society.