[blablabla123]

> In the future I suspect cancelling will be illegal:

Which actions exactly should be illegal? I assume you don't want to make me force watching movies from certain producers that I don't like anymore. At the same time in some countries retail stores basically have to cater to everyone and already can be made liable if they don't sell something that they advertised for as long as customers stick to terms and conditions.

I rather think that excess cancelling and all that comes with it is a result of perceived injustices. Even if you come up with a very creative law unless these injustices are solved the symptoms will pop up elsewhere. That said, standards in society develop over time and probably the capacity for ambivalence is going to rise again. Also people tend to give more credit to things that have been worked for more than things that have been inherited.

[AstralStorm]

Political speech, in particular, is supposed to be protected from this kind of treatment.

Most importantly, accusations of bias are also not a valid reason to fire a journalist.

There's also an intermingling of private and public sphere, and firing someone for private legal behavior because some internet hive mind started a smear campaign also should not be lawful. Of course, America has the coercive institution of at-will employment, ruining any attempt at fixing it this way.

A good step would be filling class action defamation suit against a class running a smear campaign over barely public and irrelevant things. Consequences for setting up mobs. While platform is not liable, the users are. That could make some people think twice before doing it.

[dTal]

You're going to sue me for running, in my head, the program "if misbehave, then boycott"? Because that's all it takes to be a member of a "mob". Or you're going to sue me for passing on information of <misbehavior>, even if it's true, because you're afraid of being cancelled? That's a fairly horrifying dystopia you're painting.

Nobody has to incite a mob. It just happens. It's collective action. There's no one to sue, unless you feel like suing everyone.

[JackMorgan]

I was discussing an individual being attacked for personal thoughts posted in the past. If a company supports things you don't, sure, just don't support that company. But when a group tries to get a person fired for something unpopular that they said in the past, then using a mob to get them fired is vigilante justice.

[dTal]

Companies fire such people pre-emptively, out of fear of such boycotts. This is the only thing giving "cancellation" any teeth - otherwise, how could a mob "get someone fired"? Why would any company bow?

[Udik]

> Companies fire such people pre-emptively, out of fear of such boycotts... Otherwise why would any company bow?

Because firing someone is cheap. It's not "damage control", it's virtue signalling, as costly as it is for others to express their outrage on twitter.

[shadowgovt]

But a group trying to get someone fired for what they did or said in the past is the individuals in the group exercising their own protected political speech. It's difficult to see how that can be made illegal without curtailing political speech itself.

[hackinthebochs]

If firing for speech is made illegal, then a boycott will be ineffectual and thus not happen. You don't have to outlaw the speech of the mob, just the ability for a company to fire someone over someone's past statements.

[shadowgovt]

The effectiveness of the boycott is a function of relative power levels, not whether the corporation can take action to adjust the issue.

If it's made illegal to fire people for speech, I doubt people would have any qualms (assuming they have the purchasing power and scale) with driving the corporation to bankruptcy. Another corporation will take its place.

[jimmydorry]

It is indeed difficult to see how cancelling can be made illegal without curtailing political speech itself.

If there was an easy solution though, it would probably already be in place.

[ashtonkem]

> Political speech, in particular, is supposed to be protected from this kind of treatment.

No, it is not. It is supposed to be protected from the government punishing you over it, any other requirements are purely made up.

> There's also an intermingling of private and public sphere, and firing someone for private legal behavior because some internet hive mind started a smear campaign also should not be lawful

So you would use the power of the state to suppress speech in the name of free speech? I don’t think you’ve thought through the long term consequences of this.

[Zuider]

>No, it is not. It is supposed to be protected from the government punishing you over it, any other requirements are purely made up.

The United States has an unusually robust legal protection of free speech in its constitution. It is the case that this only protects citizens from the state, and any other protections people imagine it provides are, as you state, 'purely made up.'

Even so, the First Amendment is based on a prior ethos of the value of free speech.

The philosopher, J.S. Mill, in his impassioned defense of freedom of speech saw both government and private actions as being threats to free speech, and advocated protections against both.

There is an adage which has been much repeated in recent years that freedom of speech does not imply freedom from consequences. That depends on what those 'consequences' are. One may disagree, argue back, or even block a person with whom you disagree, but it crosses a line when you respond by trying to destroy a person whose views you reject.

[jhgb]

> any other requirements are purely made up.

Protection from the government punishing you over political speech is "purely made up" as well. All laws in all countries are "purely made up", humans made them so.

[ashtonkem]

It’s fairly obvious from the context that we’re talking about the American tradition of free speech, and the jurisprudence around it. So in this case “made up” means “there is no case law to support your assertion about how the principle of free speech should work in American law”. I find an attempt to assert that all laws are made up kind of lazy side stepping of bother the issue at hand and kind of annoying.

Furthermore, even if one just decides to YOLO a few centuries of American jurisprudence on the matter, one will quickly find oneself either advocating for authoritarianism, or recreating our existing speech system from scratch. Those are the only two logical outcomes that can come from an assertion that one parties speech should be suppressed in order to “protect” (promote, imho) the speech of another group.

[jhgb]

> It’s fairly obvious

But why? Do people from other countries deserve to have their digital pasts weaponized? That was absolutely not obvious to me.

[ashtonkem]

> But why?

Because the top article is a NYT article, and this forum is largely American in composition. There are interesting discussions about free speech rights in other countries, but in this case it’s reasonable to assume an American context.

> Do people from other countries deserve to have their digital pasts weaponized

I’ll remind you that presuming good faith is a rule here, this is a nakedly bad faith interpretation of what I said.

[Udik]

> Which actions exactly should be illegal?

Firing an employee or terminating a contract in response to a twitter mob.

You are of course free to boycott whoever you want- but my impression is that those threatened boycotts won't really cause much damage to companies. People keep saying that firings are meant to "limit damage" but I have yet to see proof of this. To me it is mostly virtue signalling on the part of the involved businesses- it's not meant to prevent an economic damage but as a form of PR and advertising.

[goatinaboat]

my impression is that those threatened boycotts won't really cause much damage to companies

It still boggles my mind to see multi-billion dollar multinational companies cowering in terror from what is probably no more than a few dozen Twitter users in each case, none of whom were customers anyway, they just have too much time on their hands

[bigbillheck]

> Firing an employee or terminating a contract in response to a twitter mob

Weird way to end 'right to work' laws, but any port in a storm I guess.

[JoshuaDavid]

Assuming you meant "at-will employment" not "right to work", I unironically agree.

The symptom is that accusations or out-of- context statements or actions can spark a brief but intense reaction on Twitter, and companies frequently fire their employees based on that Twitter reaction. And then those employees may lose access to healthcare or otherwise be in a very precarious position.

So the issues are - The internet remembers forever. - Twitter mobs are self- amplifying and the size and intensity of the mob is not significantly correlated to the intensity of the perceived offense - Twitter mobs don't react based on the most correct information, but rather the most viral - Companies fire people based on Twitter mob actions because: - Companies can be liable for creating a "hostile work environment" for failing to act on things their employees did outside of work hours. - Companies can fire anyone for any reason except being a member of a protected class - Healthcare is tied to employment, so getting fired is disruptive since you need to get new insurance, which in turn probably requires you to switch doctors, get your medical records transferred over, etc.

The symptom of "people are having their lives massively disrupted by relatively minor things they did decades ago" could be approached from any of these angles. So

1. Fix Twitter (and it is specifically Twitter that is the bulk of the problem) to have a way to disprove of a message without further amplifying it 2. Fix the incentives for businesses so that the business is not responsible for what the employee does on their own time. 3. Fix the social safety net and healthcare system so getting fired is not ruinous. 4. Add more employee protections, making it harder to fire people without cause.

I personally think any of the above would work, though I'm wary of 1 (the laws required to obligate this would probably have significant chilling effects elsewhere) and 4 (depends strongly on quality of legal implementation, and I don't have a lot of faith in our legislators to write well thought out laws). I personally favor 2 - as an employer if you're not paying someone for their time I don't think you should get to dictate what they do with that time.

[CodesInChaos]

Did you confuse at-will employment (employer can fire for any reason) with right to work laws (companies can't have an agreement with a union that forces all employees to join or pay union dues)?

[Udik]

I don't understand what you mean, can you elaborate?

[ceejayoz]

> Firing an employee or terminating a contract in response to a twitter mob.

So, all I have to do is hire a few Twitter bots once in a while and I’m permanently unfireable?

[hackinthebochs]

You can still be fired for cause. But the company will have to do work to document that to demonstrate it wasn't for past statements.

[bjl]

So you're incentivizing being racist on the internet to make it harder to fire somebody.

[Udik]

This is silly. A twitter storm is a pretty well defined, public event. Do you seriously think it would be common to post racist stuff on the internet, and then organise a permanent campaign against yourself, in order to become un-fireable for causes that are work related? A company that wants to fire you for your poor performance can do so, and if you sue them it's not going to be hard for them to prove they have a legitimate cause which has nothing to do with your self-organised mobbing campaigns.