Hacker News Reader

Is the problem Twitter, or the people that use Twitter?

What honestly do you think Twitter's hand in this is? Even with a purely chronological feed, people with "selective" critical thinking skills, inconsistent value systems, and a disrespect of personal liberty will still surround themselves with other such people.

Twitter's only option would be to take a "paradox of intolerance" approach and start banning such activity, but then you are trusting a corporation to make such judgments fairly, rather than just expediently.

And if Twitter disappeared tomorrow, what then? Old-school student protests, picketing, signs/posters/pamphlets, letters in the school newspaper, and "cancel-prof-foo.net" getting thousands of views per day.

Ultimately the problem is that people are too willing to join the dogpile and/or are unwilling to stand in solidarity against the dogpile. Twitter doesn't cancel people; people cancel people.

Edit:

I also want to be very clear that Professor Katz, who accused a radical student group of being a "terrorist organization" was absolutely in the wrong for doing so and in my opinion does deserve to be censured for that statement. And making public statements about "black privilege" is even worse, which frankly leads me to question Professor Negy's moral compass and fitness to be an educator. I fully agree with the assessment that they used their rights to free speech irresponsibly, at best.

But I also think it's completely wrong to dig up an old incident for which they had already been judged and punished. I'm sure that the members of the Black Justice League are strongly opposed to policies that take away the rights of convicted felons, and I'm sure that they all have the critical thinking skills to recognize the parallel here, and I'm also sure that none of them would be interested in admitting such. In my opinion the only correct move by the University here is to dole out wrist slaps on both sides and tell all parties involved to drop it or face further consequences.

I bet twitter could have (and maybe still could) cut down toxicity massively by only showing tweets in an algorithmic feed that are not replies to an existing tweet.

I think the big problem with twitter is that people are often only exposed to the "other side" of an argument by first seeing a reply to that tweet from someone they are following (and probably agree with). That's a recipe for starting mob flame wars.

The problem is people in positions of authority listening to Twitter mobs.

That stops and the mobs lose all their power. It will probably take some lawsuits to set the standard too.

This is what I was getting at when I was talking about "standing against the dogpile".

I agree with what you said, but things get hairy when other people in positions of authority agree with, or are part of, the mob.

There already have been lawsuits (e.g. a recent HN thread about a shop getting "canceled" by Oberlin students, leading to a large award in favor of the shop), but I don't think anything is going to change until the general society pendulum swings the other way. And then we have to worry about what's on the other side of the pendulum...

It's not Twitter.

The problem is vindictive people in positions of authority, with no constraints, and heavy ideology aka Universities.

Most American corporations are not ideological, the public sector is a highly constrained place.

Universities allow profs to have their petty adult beefs with each other, veiled in intellectual language or moralisms etc..

> Ultimately the problem is that people are too willing to join the dogpile and/or are unwilling to stand in solidarity against the dogpile.

The problem is that the effort required to join the dogpile is miniscule and continuing to decrease, but the net effect of many joining is not.

This was, pre-internet, kept in balance by requiring people to do something uncomfortable to protest (e.g. leaving the house, marching all day on the street).

The quip used to be that Internet anonymity turns everyone into an asshole, but that doesn't ring true these days.

Now, the decreased minimum effort required means that 10,000 people can take 5 minutes each to be an asshole, and Facegramchattertok will happily amplify and distribute the result to increase ad revenue.

The problem is also the media. Twitter outrage mobs aren’t so effective on their own because average people don’t read twitter. But news sites often pick up these outrage mobs and shun a light on them. Which amplifies the outrage and puts it in places regular people read.

And then companies have to act on it because the media sites are reposting tweets claiming the cloudflare CEO wants to see trans people die or whatever the thing of the day is.

Absolutely. I'm sure media was always a retread of an official / inside feed from somewhere, but it feels so much more automatic now.

24/7 to fill with content = {scrape social media trends} -> {generate story} -> {repeat}

Every single day I see "reputable" news sites put out headlines like "Twitter outrage over [X]" and I think this is why journalism is dying. The "man on the street" piece has a time-honored place in journalism, but previous generations understood that the opinions of random strangers are not, in and of themselves, NEWS. They were fluff pieces and human interest bits, not headlines. They constitute opinion at best, and usually closer to gossip most of the time. I don't blame Twitter itself, per se. But it is easier for journalists to find opinions than to find facts, and that has certainly led to a degradation in quality of news stories and a near total loss of understanding of what constitutes bias in journalism.

This is the central flaw of social media itself.

As engineer by training this is positive feedback with a wide bandwidth loop gain which is ALWAYS a recipe of unstable system behavior. Things that could "fix" social media:

1. Slow down the speed of replies - e.g. 24 hours instead of seconds

2. Reduce the gain - limit how many people can see your reply or post to a narrower range of people you know instead of broadcasting to the universe.

This is exactly what you do with feedback systems like amplifiers or analog circuits to control their stability and prevent unstable behavior. :-)

I don't think it has much to do with social media, other than if you were in the same physical space as many online influencers and trying to have a mundane conversation with them, there would be so many behavioral red flags that you would never follow them anywhere.

Instead, it's the same effect as "nobody gets fired for buying IBM." If you follow the crowd, you won't get punished even if what you're doing turns out to have horrific consequences. At best, one could argue that echo chambers fool mob participants into overestimating the size of the crowd, but people on twitter are fully aware that there are people who hate them, and that they hate, and the most unhinged of them spend all day following those enemies around lobbing insults at them, and trying to get them fired or hurt.

There's a significant and illustrative overlap between public opinion-havers and tv/press pundits: pundits got fired for being right about Iraq, CIA black sites, etc. Everybody who was wrong about those things is still being trotted around as if they were an expert on something. Because this is a game of playing it safe, not a game of truth. If something is dangerous, like deviating from the crowd or the boss, do the other thing.

If you see a crowd of wolves surrounding a sheep, be a wolf, not a sheep.

Yes. It's 100% BOTH.

Twitter is going to have some major, major legal problems with the current Missouri lawsuit - acting as a direct agent of the US Government puts Twitter 100% under the jurisdiction and requirements of the 1st Amendment. "The government shall not infringe" now includes Twitter censorship!

Social media as also enabled mentally ill and fringe lunatics to have a voice that is nominally equal to people who are rational and law-and-order based. In so far as individuals should show "reasonable restraint" in anything they do or say (to avoid 1st Amendment, discrimination, slander, libel or other ILLEGAL speech acts), that is partially and centrally an individual's fault as well.

Both feed on each other. Both are evil in any sense of what civilization and civil society are. The pendulum will swing back and in many ways already is.

When a group of people act like terrorists, it's absolutely wrong or illegal. It's not polite but politeness is not the measure. The definition of terrorism lately is (per the FBI):

Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.

Committing slander or libel or violating the 1st Amendment (if government OR GOVERNMENT AGENT) is precisely terrorism by the above legal definition given by the government itself.

I appreciate your thoughts and mostly agree with this sentiment. But "slander or libel", while bad, is not the same as "violent, criminal acts". Our legal system currently and rightly distinguishes on severity, and I don't think we should abandon that distinction. Libel is bad, but literal terrorist violence is worse and different.

Twitter is not an 'agent' of the US Government, that's completely ridiculous, as is the lawsuit alleging that somehow the government (really political entity) somehow 'forced' Twitter to do something political. There's nothing there.

Interestingly, it seems like people joining a mob would be a signal of poor judgement and all around jerkiness. I wouldn’t want to fire someone who tweeted “#ucffirehim” but it would be good to know who was in such a mob.

I've had a pet theory that a lot of these "action committees" (for lack of a better word) in tech companies are supported by the company because of that. You may want to know who in your company tends to be incendiary and keep them away from the clients. I have no real evidence of this but from a intelligence standpoint I think a company would have a lot to gain from that at almost zero cost.

There's a certain irony in scolding others for their perceived victimhood while simultaneously claiming to be a victim yourself.

I never claimed to be a victim of it. All I said what this mentality has driven me off from contributing/joining various groups because of the fear of these people existing in the ranks. The constantly changing rules of what is right, what is wrong, what words are "good" and "bad", political alignments, etc is all too much for me to even try to understand further than not understanding is a reason to attack me according to these kinds of people.

If I was attacked by it, I'd be a victim. I'm not a victim, but I exercise an abundance of caution (conversations as brief, formal, and public as possible and recorded when not) when dealing with this kind of person in the workplace and I'd rather not have to do even more of that in my free time. I already spend enough clock cycles trying to identify these people so I know who to avoid, monitor, or if I'm forced to talk to them arrange a proper meeting/recording so everything is in the clear. Perhaps I am being extreme, but if I lose my health insurance I die and I cannot reasonably let some punk take that away from me so easily.

> I never claimed to be a victim of it.

Profs Negy and Katz did, and in spectacularly offensive fashion.

The professor is literally and obviously a victim of an ideological and authoritarian mob attack on his career. Blatant.

Claims of victimhood by any other group are debatable in any general context.

I'm ashamed that intelligent adults on HN could somehow come to the conclusion that ganging up on professors who have opinions different than one's own is somehow warranted. It's repulsive.

> The professor is literally and obviously a victim of an ideological and authoritarian mob attack on his career. Blatant.

The point I have been making throughout this thread is that both things can be true.

Negy and Katz both said nasty offensive things, seemingly on purpose in order to rile people up and/or because they are bad people. You can't "whatabout" your way out of that.

The people they said offensive things about are somewhat-radical ideologues who lack respect for freedom and due process.

Two wrongs do not make a right, and vigilante justice is illegal for a reason.

IMO, strongly taking one side in this issue is a clear signal that you are abandoning your own critical thinking skills in favor of your feelings.

There's a fundamental difference.

He said something he thought to be true - he was making a rhetorical point, in an uncomfortable and insensitive manner. He doesn't really come from a position of power and notably, has wasn't 'going after' anyone, just making a dumb comment.

The person representing the authority or power in the equation ... it doesn't matter much what their statements were, the fact is they went after him (and others) in a systematic and authoritarian manner.

At most, he should have been asked to apologize for being insensitive.

The school, however, needs to be investigated for systematic oppression of profs. using their weird internal investigations to harass people (aka '9 hour interviews? That's fing STASI like stuff, it's what the FBI does to serial killers. Could you imagine your employer grilling you in a room for 9 hours?).

He spoke out of line, the school acted with retribution using arbitrary authority.

The students attempting to get Negy fired also adamantly believe that they are doing the right thing.

It doesn't really matter what they believe, judicially.

Trump believed he won the election.

The students should also be given actual leadership, so that they can contextualize their concerns, and understand when they're being tits.

Some of them want to be tits, which is fine, so long as they aren't being overly vindictive or violent, being a tit is not illegal in most cases.

That there is no easy way to contextualize all of this is insane.

People seem to take one of 'either side' and can't find where a reasonable landing point is.

It's hard because the 'system' in Academia is judicializing their moral perspective, aka referring to protesters as 'terrorists' off hand is considered 'crime' when really it's 'insensitive and irresponsible'.

I should not be that hard and these schools and unions need to be reformed.

There's an actual 'irony' in those that have difficulty grasping the difference between rhetoric about perceived social victimhood, and actual direct victhimhood, sneering about 'irony and victomhood'.

Whether or not Black people are victims in any given scenario is debatable. Firing this prof is obviously ridiculous and speaks to the actual authoritarian systems on campus.

This is only irony if you cannot distinguish between role playing and the real thing.

The perpetrators of the former use the word "victimhood" manipulatively to abuse the intuitive sympathy that normal non-callous people feel for real victims, and unfortunately it somewhat works, because many people are gullible to such tricks.

> I have no idea why or where this started

Money. You can pay groups to try to “cancel” others. Generally a performance fee applies if successful.

No, this is definitely not about money, and it's not even about ideology - it's petty backstabbing vindictiveness. These are adults beating each other up on the playground.

> Regardless of whether you agree with this person's opinions or not I think it's safe to say Twitter has become an actual cancer on the world.

The problem isn't Twitter, it's the goons. They have quite a bit of influence on major social institutions, and that's not merely because they can tweet.

Without social media, we'd be left with legacy news organizations and their distorted narratives.

Social media has been at least as warped thanks to state interference and astroturfing, as well as The Algorithm itself creating echo chambers. Social media is designed to make every user feel like they're in the majority no matter their views. Couple that with the incentive to keep users "engaged" by keeping them outraged, and you end up with a user base of various angry mobs from all sides.

If it wasn't twitter it would be Facebook or something else we can't even imagine. The problem is Americans.

Didn't the moral equivalent of a Twitter mob lead to Brexit? The problem is humans.

Yes. It's definitely not a blue/red team issue. More generally, I think the problem is low information humans. Humans who react with emotions first reflexively and then selectively scrape available data to build up some sandcastle to support their actions.

With Brexit, there was some vague notion of exploitation by the EU and by immigrants, and of lost sovereignty, and with Twitter mobs, it's of some great unpunished injustice. With the former, it leads to people voting against their own interests, and with the latter, a rejection of law and order and a return to half hearted vigilante justice.

Sort of. Brexit was mostly driven by all the right wing tabloids, which have been around long before social media.

If you're describing more than half a country as a "Twitter mob", I suggest the analogy is flawed.

I'm not sure it is. The reason that Twitter mobs hold sway over university administrators is that they represent a large enough subset of the University community, including enough individuals of influence in power. A mob does not have to be a minority.

I wonder if it started when tumblr collapsed and its toxic user base was unleashed across the internet.