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Comment by Cenk | Hacker News Reader

The clip in question: https://livestreamfails.com/clip/150015

Honestly the "no one is laughing" punchline makes it hard for me to call this a transphobic joke. It's a transphobic-phobic joke and not gonna lie I chuckled.

At the end, I thought... This could actually be one of Seinfeld's standups on the show, and he definitely wouldn't have got canceled for it.

At least no one was ever laughing from Seinfeld's standups.

Do you really believe that nobody laughed at one of the most famous comedians of our time, or is this comment just some kind of signaling that you don't agree with the guy's views?

IIRC - the show was much funnier than the standup bits.

The bits are too short to get really funny.

Sometimes, they were quite good - but it's hard to go from a cold open to hysteria in <2 minutes.

It's impressive if you can even get most people to laugh in that short of time.

Seinfeld (the show) was funny because of Larry David, not Jerry Seinfeld.

The delivery is so bad, you could take it either way.

However, censoring a sentence like "thinking about making a joke about how transgender people are ruining the fabric of society" is very thought-police. In itself, it says nothing, and certainly cannot be seen as hate speech.

That have never mattered to the mob. Anyone who questions this new religion must be silenced.

I don’t really see a mob on this one. Twitch has a platform policy that they enforced - probably a little too heavily here. Is there some sort of community outcry elsewhere?

I think most people who understand the context of the clip (AI-generated Seinfeld) — even if, like me, their hackles rise at any kind of possibly-transphobic material - would think this was pretty tame/kinda funny.

Agreed. This is more censorship than I'd prefer, but at least it was censorship by policy rather than censorship by mob whim (granted, the policy was probably shaped to avoid the sort of mob behavior we witnessed over the last decade).

I think it's more that Twitch's leadership takes certain things like this personally.

> I don’t really see a mob on this one

Well, it either had to be mass-reported or spread online as a hate incident. I think Twitch mostly over-reacts to those.

Is there evidence of this? It seems like nobody was even really talking about this before the ban and I find it hard to believe a huge movement rose up and then vanished without a trace.

I did not say it was a huge movement. But it was big enough to get the account suspended by reporting it.

Enough to get an account suspended could be one or two reports, far from a mob.

It still seems like you're saying there was coordinated effort. I ask again, what evidence is there of this? I find it hard to believe in a world where nothing can be deleted these public calls to action failed to be recorded.

That's one of the most unsettling parts of outrage/censorship culture. All that is really required to commit a foul is mentioning a topic in an unsanctioned way, regardless of what is actually said. The sanctioned ways are either having the right social pedigree (bona fides that imply good faith beyond reproach), or sticking to specific memes that have trickled down to the masses. It's like older religion where only priests could interpret the word of God, with anything else considered heresy.

It's almost as if the AI has a better command of nuance than Twitch's human moderators.

Hmmm, that was very mild... It sounds like something an actual comedian might say.

OK that was actually kind of funny

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