Schools Report Bomb Threats Following Libs of TikTok Anti-LGBTQ Posts | Hacker News Reader

Schools Report Bomb Threats Following Libs of TikTok Anti-LGBTQ Posts

vice.com

16 pointsheavyset_go14 comments

Having lived in a few countries without freedom of speech and freedom of press, this article looks extremely familiar. The basic line of argument is that a blogger/journalist/gadfly may not have done anything but amplify existing publicly available information without alteration, but this amplification influenced a third party to act illegally. Even if there's no direct incitement to any illegal activity, it becomes implicitly and self-evidently no longer speech but a criminal conspiracy.

The last line of the article is "How much are we going to tolerate?"

This framing seems to muddle concerns between someone's else's speech, policy violations being brought to the attention of someone's employer, and illegal activities. Harassment, defamation, concrete incitements to violence and credible threats of violence which meet well-defined legal standards are already illegal with both civil and criminal penalties.

Now of course TikTok is a private company and legally there's little obstacle to having a content policy which is more restrictive than the law. Even so, advocacy of censorship in the name of public safety because of potential second order effects on third parties is a fundamentally authoritarian principle.

The way I've seen it advanced in other societies is that first the government leans on the private sector, then implements rules in the public sphere broadening the definition of material and moral support for violence until it's so broad as to be totally discretionary. Finally, it becomes both legal and accepted within the mainstream political culture to punish anyone critical of arbitrary censorship as such.

It doesn't matter if it starts on the "right" or the "left." Once this achieves fixation within the political culture, whoever is in power currently and typically whoever takes power next (even if nominally their political opposite) will use this erosion of norms to treat opposition speech as criminal.

Failure to anticipate the shoe being on the other foot one day is extremely short-sighted, regardless of your political views.

> Harassment, defamation, concrete incitements to violence and credible threats of violence which meet well-defined legal standards are already illegal with both civil and criminal penalties.

There has to be a will to prosecute. This is nowhere near being followed in each instance where it should.

> Failure to anticipate the shoe being on the other foot one day is extremely short-sighted, regardless of your political views.

I tend to think your comment is basically suffering from the logical error of a false equivalence. The "other side" in this isn't acting with the desire to extinguish and murder.

You've missed the context that the "shoe" in the metaphor is the act of justifying politically motivated censorship by referencing public safety. Obviously bomb threats aren't protected speech and I've yet to see an instance of anyone of any political persuasion publicly defending them.

> There has to be a will to prosecute. This is nowhere near being followed in each instance where it should.

If a stranger who reads your comment later goes on to make a death threat towards a district attorney who doesn't prosecute, should you be censored or prosecuted for what they interpreted as an implicit call for extra-judicial violence?

Once you legitimize the power to infer hidden incitements to violence in ordinary speech, that power will eventually be captured by your worst enemy and used against you.

What's the point of this article?

Cyberbullying campaigns on from twitter aren't new.

This kind of coverage of it is making it feel like another "battle in the culture war" which I'm getting really tired of.

Maybe the point is the reach - this lists dozens of school districts receiving bomb threats.

Maybe that's normal, but without knowledge of other cyberbullying campaigns that seems pretty remarkable.

Sorry I got confused - am I supposed to interpret this as stochastic terrorism, or as the language of the unheard? What about when two teens deliberately run over a cyclist [0], or any of the other black-on-white killings, such as ones VICE themselves reported on [1]? Or when a school board president, his wife, and his children, are threatened for allowing only the US flag in school [2]? Does VICE news share guilt for their promotion of hate [3,4,5,6,7]? Do the schools, when they dehumanize whites into mosquitoes [8,9]?

[0] https://abcnews.go.com/US/retired-police-chief-killed-las-ve...

[1] Can You Commit a Hate Crime Against a White Person? - https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4jadx/can-you-commit-a-hate...

[2] 'People are threatening me, my wife and my children,' Sunol school board prez claims after banning flags - https://www.ktvu.com/news/sunol-school-board-president-says-...

[3] Want to Heal Yourself from 'Toxic Whiteness'? This Class Can Help - https://www.vice.com/en/article/3b4k79/toxic-whiteness-every...

[4] 100 Ways White People Can Make Life Less Frustrating For People of Color - https://www.vice.com/en/article/ne95dm/how-to-be-a-white-all...

[5] Dear White People, Please Stop Pretending Reverse Racism Is Real - https://www.vice.com/en/article/kwzjvz/dear-white-people-ple...

[6] Dear White Vegans, Stop Appropriating Food - https://www.vice.com/en/article/bv833z/dear-white-vegans-sto...

[7] What it's like to take a vacation away from white people - https://www.vice.com/en/article/mb5gea/what-its-like-to-take...

[8] New Prague school staff training video depicts white people as mosquitoes - https://alphanews.org/new-prague-school-staff-training-video...

[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQ9l7y4UuxY - the titular video itself

You seem to equate one-off incidents with patterns. That makes anything in the links you've posted pretty meaningless.

I can't be bothered to run the math now (especially since the FBI tracking hispanic ethnicity separately from race complicates everything), but I believe that according to the 2016 FBI homicide statistics, a random black person is about 10x as likely to kill a white person, as a random white person is to kill a black. (There are "only" 2x as many black-on-white murders as white-on-black, but there are ~5x more white people than black, so the per-capita interracial murder perpetration rate is 10x higher. I'm going by memory, so I welcome a double-check)

Regardless, the media do not hesitate to abuse "one-off incidents". I applaud your appeal to a higher standard, but unless you apply this standard evenly, it is just another form of bias.

Did you read your [1] link? Their answer was "yes, in fact" and aside from taking the perspective that this may be surprising to many folks, the article doesn't really argue against it.

You know that these types of folks don't read articles.

I did read that article. It was an example of an obvious black-on-white hate crime, not of VICE's hate peddling. I have clarified which of my sources refer to what to remove the ambiguity.

Ah, OK, I thought you were suggesting Vice condones that kind of thing (as Betteridge's law might encourage a headline-reader to think of the piece)

Are you suggesting that an article about veganism and black creators incites the same level of hate that leads to bomb-threats being called to schools because of a pride flag in a classroom?

I fail to see how any of these articles are promoting hate or violence against white people in the same way LibsOfTiktok is accusing LGBTQ+ people of being sexual predators against children.

What does any of this tripe have to do with the article?

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