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Cancel culture is very often concerted petitioning of someone's employer into terminating someone's employment (harassment) or the threat of the same (recall the Hispanic utility company employee who was terminated for making the 'ok' sign inadvertently or the data scientist who was terminated for Tweeting a prominent black academic's research on the efficacy of nonviolent protests or the journalist who was harassed by coworkers and nearly terminated for interviewing a black man who expressed concern about crime in his neighborhood). It's also frequently walking into a venue and disrupting the speaker such that their message can't reach the crowd. It may also look like forming a dangerous mob outside of a venue such that the venue can't cover the security costs for hosting a speaker.

If petitioning your employer to fire you for something you said works, maybe you said something that your employer would fire you over?

That's, again, not harassment and threats, it's your employer using freedom of association to deny guilt by proxy for spreading someone else's lies, threats, and harassments.

jonahx 2077 days ago

> If petitioning your employer to fire you for something you said works, maybe you said something that your employer would fire you over?

Possibly, but there is another possibility which also occurs with alarming frequency:

The employer, feeling bullied and afraid of bad press, demonstrations, etc, makes a calculated risk vs reward decision: Is keeping this employee worth the (possibly existential) risk to my business?

That is, the employer may personally have zero problem with what you said, but fire you anyway because "it's just not worth it." The decision to fire is the result of both cowardice by the employer and coercion by the petitioners, even if that coercion is not an explicit threat.

If an employer fears bad press, perhaps it's because the thing their employee did is unpopular and their business is built on public perception?

I mean, we can keep digging, but at the end of the day the story keeps resolving to "Someone said something people didn't like and there are consequences." Technology has made it easier, by dint of lowering the cost of investigation of a person, to apply those consequences; it hasn't changed the rules under which society has operated in general. We block those consequences in terms of government intervention; we've never back-stopped them in terms of private intervention outside of some very, very specific class constraints.

If we want to discuss whether holocaust denial should be a protected class constraint, that would fit the existing (US) mold for constraint of reaction to speech by private citizens, but good luck finding popular support for holocaust denial protection.

As the comic says, defending a position by citing free speech says that the most compelling virtue of your words is that they're not literally illegal to say.

jonahx 2077 days ago

> If an employer fears bad press, perhaps it's because the thing their employee did is unpopular and their business is built on public perception?

> I mean, we can keep digging, but at the end of the day the story keeps resolving to "Someone said something people didn't like and there are consequences."

I see your argument here, in theory. Two things make me uneasy with it: lack of perfect information; and the power of disinformation.

That is, "unpopular" and "someone said something people didn't like" can't be taken for granted. A small vocal minority, especially one skilled with social media, can make something appear more unpopular than it actually is. And few people are equipped to gauge what the reality is (accurate polling, eg, can be problematic even for those with large resources, let alone a small business owner).

It is easy, then, to force the employer to make a decision about a risk they cannot gauge accurately, and which is made to appear much larger than they would view it if they knew the true average opinions of their customers. Couple this with most people's natural risk aversion, and you have a genuine problem that you can't write off as "well, employers are just finally being forced to respond to the will of the people."

hn_throwaway_99 2077 days ago

I mean, I'm kind of surprised after this back-and-forth that it isn't as clear cut as you seem to think it is. I mean, I've seen both of you make pretty reasoned arguments, and the fact that you still disagree I would at least think proves the point that people who disagree with your definition of free speech (or, rather, your definition of "cancel culture" and your definition of "harassment and threats") are not crazy lunatics.

I mean, let's be honest: getting someone blackballed from gainful employment sure seems like harassment for any reasonable definition of the term. You just seem to believe that there are sometimes good reasons for that to occur.

> recall the Hispanic utility company employee who was terminated for making the 'ok' sign inadvertently or the data scientist who was terminated for Tweeting a prominent black academic's research on the efficacy of nonviolent protests or the journalist who was harassed by coworkers and nearly terminated for interviewing a black man who expressed concern about crime in his neighborhood

Which of these are things an employer would reasonably fire an employee over? I don't think any reasonable person would believe that these people would have been fired if it weren't for the concerted canceling. Otherwise why would people bother petitioning the employer if the employer would have fired them anyway?

Moreover, do cancel-culture proponents really want to cement the precedent that employment is just an ordinary association, and that anyone's employment (and thus livelihood and health insurance) can be terminated on the whims of their employer? Would they feel comfortable allowing a Trump-voting employer to casually part ways with an employee upon finding out they support Biden? Bear in mind that you and I and those we know are probably much more likely to be in high-demand tech positions than the median American.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/18/miles-taylor-former-trump-st...

> do cancel-culture proponents really want to cement the precedent that employment is just an ordinary association, and that anyone's employment (and thus livelihood and health insurance) can be terminated on the whims of their employer?

If we're talking about the US, that's already extremely firmly cemented outside of specific union protections (I haven't heard about unions going to bat for employees getting called out; I'd be interested to see if it's happening).

It's a major issue with the way American employment works, but is somewhat orthogonal to the question of calling out people for bad behavior. People can lose their health insurance if their employer doesn't like their haircut also; the root issue is that health insurance ought not be tied to employment.

> Would they feel comfortable allowing a Trump-voting employer to casually part ways with an employee upon finding out they support Biden?

That happens all the time. So does employers supporting employees' support of a political candidate.

Politicization of labor isn't new. My relatives who are union are required to spend off-job time working a phone bank for a few hours every election cycle in support of the candidate the union is backing; it's part of their union agreement.

> If we're talking about the US, that's already extremely firmly cemented outside of specific union protections (I haven't heard about unions going to bat for employees getting called out; I'd be interested to see if it's happening).

It's not firmly cemented, it's a common law, but it's well within the realm of possibility that Congress would pass a bill that strengthens employment protections. This is something the US has gone back and forth on for a long time; why do you assume it's fixed (i.e. "cemented") now? And if it's not cemented, why would you want to lean into that precedent?

> but is somewhat orthogonal to the question of calling out people for bad behavior.

How can you make the argument that it's "just employers' exercising their freedom-of-association rights" and then argue that freedom of association is orthogonal? Anyway, we're not talking about them exercising their freedom of association rights, we're talking about coercing employers into terminating employees who fail to toe the party line.

> That happens all the time. So does employers supporting employees' support of a political candidate.

Right, but I'm guessing you would argue that this is immoral and harmful behavior--if so, why would you advocate for those who would emulate it (note that canceling is even worse, because it's not just an employer parting ways with a heretical employee, but a mob pressuring an employer to part ways with said heretical employee)?

> Politicization of labor isn't new. My relatives who are union are required to spend off-job time working a phone bank for a few hours every election cycle in support of the candidate the union is backing; it's part of their union agreement.

Why would they do this if the status quo was already "extremely firmly cemented"?

> I'm guessing you would argue that this is immoral and harmful behavior

I do not. I argue that the public putting pressure on individuals who spread bad ideas to stop doing that---up to and including looping their employer in, up to and including the employer terminating that employment relationship---is part of the healthy public immune system to bad ideas and antisocial behavior. "We live in a society" and all that. The government is constrained from doing it because the machinery of government can be co-opted by tyrants, so people need the right to call tyrants what they are. Not because it's the obligation of every individual to feed those who seek their destruction.

In US history, unpopular politicians used to have their houses torn down brick by brick by an angry mob and tossed in a river. We've come quite a long way in expressing disagreement in a civilized way, but there's no expectation that someone should keep paying you money (or, in the concrete case of Facebook and what content they host, giving you an open "billboard along the highway" of their community communication service) so you can spend it on denying their history or their right to exist (or the history and right to exist of their customers).

remarkEon 2077 days ago

"Well they probably did something to deserve getting fired" is certainly a take. I'd ask though, would these companies still fire you if there wasn't a mob, social media or otherwise, causing a ruckus?

That's a little irrelevant; if someone wasn't complaining, it's likely one's boss wouldn't know.

But that doesn't imply it's the mob's fault; it's up to the person who said the things to not say things their employer would fire them for.

The point is the employer wouldn't fire them apart from the mob's pressure. Moreover, mobs are famously fickle and they're happy to descend upon anyone, guilty or not (even irrespective of whether or not today's target was part of the mob yesterday). I really hope we can agree that mob rule is strictly worse than rule of law.

The rule of law doesn't exclude an employer deciding an employee is more trouble than they're worth outside of some very specific situations (class protection, etc.).

Within the constraint of the rule of law, a group of people can organize to petition an employer to remove an employee for behavior A, and the employer can evaluate A and decide whether the group's claims are untrue, A should be removed for the behavior, or it's not worth the time to decide and A should be removed to quiet the group.

Good employers won't do 3, and we should probably shame the employers who do, but I think it opens a Pandora's box to constrain their choices with further law on this topic.