[nandhinianand]

Okay.. this comment finally got me to login and chime-in on this topic. > And I don’t care how rare it is. It’s not rare enough. It’s not good if it happens once. “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” And again, I agree that sometimes people just said something shitty or at least that got interpreted shittily, but I have never seen something even once where it didn’t feel like a horridly disproportionate response. Not even once.

Completely agree... No arguments with this ..

And as always there is a but.. (Note: following is not a personal or specific counter-argument to this comment). The general calling it "cancel-culture" or "leftist political correctness forcing it's way (Aka fascist-leftist" narrative misses the point as much as the common "it's rare, but these people deserve it. They're horrible people" narrative.

The way i look at it "freedom to innovate, and have a system that sets up a market that encourages innovation" has brought us this current social media centered around outrage, fear, anger and rage centered way of connecting to people. Those employers are "free-to-fire" as much as each person in the mob that responds with rage is free to express their opinion and the one person who uncensoredly tweeted something is free to make mistakes. So what's the solution, I don't know anything specific outside of going all mystic/mythic/wishful saying we should all practice empathy better, we should find better ways of connecting to each other and may be (social networking and recommendation) algorithms that can help deeper connections than shallow ones.

To be honest, there's a skeptical(and pessimistic and fearful) side of me that thinks that's not gonna happen and we'll end up in a divergent world(https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2022/02/23/divergentism/).

The other solution proposed is (completely free speech with pure anonymity based protection from society based outlash) also suffers from the problems like minority voices getting drowned out. Majority opinions and stereotypes being elevated to "The capital "T" Truth"(https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/224865-the-capital-t-truth-...) rather than being viewed in perspective..

> “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” This is a noble sentiment, but I do wonder how much this is true in what we have managed to implement and wonder if we would ever be able to implement something like this without going to "minority report" level extreme censoring and monitoring. (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=925249... ) or with some humour(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXPOw2unxy0).

[ABCLAW]

>this current social media centered around outrage, fear, anger and rage

Whenever I see takes like this, I wonder what platforms people are using and how they're using them.

I interact with my family on facebook, read some stuff on subreddits I like, and don't use twitter; I don't really experience any of the above. My girlfriend, by contrast, will come to me visibly shaken once a week regarding some drama happening on instagram, which baffles me.

Am I the one that's out of touch here? Or is this 'FUDmedia' a bit overblown and the result of spending time looking for the hot goss? I'm probably the one that's out of touch, but oh boy is it nice.

[jchw]

You know, for a long time, I used to blame Twitter or Tumblr for making people neurotic and thus causing “cancel culture” or whatever you want to call it. And, maybe there is some truth there. But honestly, I think the true issue that’s making us all sick is our neurotic attachment to the internet. If anything is making us sickly, it’s having smartphones that basically ensure we’re online literally all the time and can’t escape it. Maybe it isn't literally unhealthy in and of itself to have a smartphone around at all times, but I think the degree to which it enables people to become “integrated” with Twitter and other social media is insane. Things that were nice conveniences on desktop, like push notifications, can become scary and frankly intimidating when they follow you around literally all day.

The old internet Yishan speaks of might not be that old, but it feels ancient and very distinct from what we have today. The old internet was an escape from whatever life had to offer. It was something you could log into when you got home and hang out with other nerds and enthusiasts in your niche. That’s all gone because now it’s not just nerds and now your niche is decontextualized into a giant social media soup where people are constantly judging and critiquing everything and often in bad faith or at least irrationally.

I actually fully agree that cancel culture is a silly concept, because cancel culture doesn’t capture how insidious and unhealthy internet relations have become. It isolates one specific dysfunctional behavior (the tendency for people to form mobs and absolutely try to obliterate livelihoods over relatively small transgressions) while ignoring or maybe even inherently accepting all of the dysfunctional crap that leads up to it and surrounds it. “Cancel culture” is just a symptom of deeply unhealthy social relationships, rather than an intentional plot by the “radical left”. And maybe the reason we only complain about cancellation is because deep down, we don’t want to give up all of what the internet offers, even a lot of the less healthy things. Because yeah, quote retweets dunking on someone with bad faith arguments may make for great screenshots to send to your group chat of likeminded people, but is it really advancing the discourse?

I think it’s not necessarily Twitter’s responsibility to figure out all of the answers here. It would be kind of tragic if we couldn’t find some sort of solution that didn’t involve regulating social media or computers, though. Maybe it’s unlikely, but my hope is kind of that it resolves itself. If social media usage started to shrink simply because people became tired of it and it was no longer socially “cool”, that alone might help out a lot. In general, convincing people to take social media far less seriously would help a lot. The reduction of the real world influence of Twitter and its respective beefs and callouts would basically kneecap the concept of “cancelling” somebody online.

For now though, I agree it’s all a bit nebulous. There’s no obvious way out. I guess the only difference for me before and after reading the tweet thread from the OP is that I understand now that it isn’t Twitter’s fault. They’re just the platform currently holding the curse.