I think there’s a simpler explanation that wasn’t really talked about in the article — “cancelling” is just voting with your wallet and right of voluntary association and pressuring those in power to do so as well. This kind of behavior is born out of the natural frustration of people not only not facing consequences but at times becoming more successful as a result of the harm they cause. It’s filling a gap in our legal system so if you want to see cancel culture end it will be because it moves to the courts with things like a national hate speech law and sexual assault and domestic violence laws that don’t heavily favor the abuser.
You’re free to not like or want these things to be codified in law but it’s still nonetheless the formula of how to turn mob rule into a dialog. Nobody is showing up to the house of a murderer with pitchforks anymore because we have a functioning court system. Factory owners aren’t having their door broken down by angry workers because we have labor laws.
Groups using cancel culture tactics don’t necessarily share politics, but they share a strange willingness to do harm to others that don’t share their belief system. That makes them more alike than different in my opinion. Above all else, they are bullies.
The way social media works today is crazy. Like someone's tweet can be cherry picked out of 10,000+ tweets to control any narrative about that person. I often delete tweets out of pure regret and often think how the tweet would be weaponized against me in the future. This is why I've largely shifted to messenger apps with disappearing messages turned on. Some things just need to be ephemeral and forgotten about.
Not just that they can cherry-pick, but they can go back many years to find words of your own to turn against you. Peoples' positions on all sorts of topics change over time. Punishing them for ever having a certain point of view doesn't help anyone. Instead people should be happy to see that change happen. It means the person took in new information about the world and other people and adjusted their opinions to match. That is far better than someone who digs their feet into a position and cover their ears, even if that position does turn out to be the better one.
when I, and others, did moderation of a community primarily communicating with Slack, using the channels to cause drama was an easy way to get yourself talked about in the moderator chat. Eventually, some of us moved to Telegram, which had the nice feature of letting you know when someone had taken screenshots of 'private' messages. There's ways around that if you don't want the recipient to know you are recording them, of course, but I think the lesson from all that was if you don't want to get yourself in trouble for stirring the pot, then take your conversations offline, with people, in person.
I think the experience Elon Musk had in regards to this effect is why he developed a strong aversion for misinformation/lies - and why he seems to have genuinely decided to acquire Twitter; even if he's playing a game to see if either he can get it cheaper than his offer by forcing Twitter to be transparent with its numbers, or deciding its not worth anywhere near $44 billion - and perhaps launching his own platform; he does have x.com - not the best for branding, but quick to type at least; x marks the spot.
I don't think ephemeral messages really solve the problem because the information that seems most often weaponized are public posts - or a person can just take a screenshot of it if they're interacting with you for the express purpose of gathering something they could frame in a bad light against you.
>I think the experience Elon Musk had in regards to this effect is why he developed a strong aversion for misinformation/lies
I'm lost. Musk himself was spreading misinformation and lies about Covid, e.g. about HCQ/Ivermectin being magic cures to his 62M twitter followers. What lies and misinformation are you talking about?
So you're certain that the pharmaceutical industrial complex had nothing to do with suppressing existing, safe medications, by spreading propaganda that they weren't effective - and even dangerous - rather that you need to buy their newer, expensive treatment?
Are you so sure Musk was spreading misinformation?
Did you know that Pfizers new anti-viral drug targets the same pathway that Ivermectin apparently uses as well? I've seen that stated elsewhere - but also someone on HN not so long ago brought it up too, and provided citations to that research.
Are you aware of how much money and what % of ad spend on mainstream-mass media channels is paid for by the pharmaceutical industry? Ads which are solely meant to manipulate people to believe something to then do certain behaviours they otherwise wouldn't have? Is it starting to feel like a conspiracy theory to you, even though the logic holds?
Musk doesn't know how to read and interpret medical studies. So he thought HCQ was a magic cure based on a quack Google doc and spread it.
Ivermectin turned out to be somewhat helpful only if the covid patient had stomach worms which is rare in the US. Ad spending by pharma companies doesn't there are bad quality studies pushed by quacks who mislead people like Musk, Trump and Fox News hosts who have their own agendas.
If any of those actually worked after 2 years of intense research the Chinese govt would be all over them instead of wrecking their economy and political capital with lockdowns. Musk has hundreds of billions, if those drugs actually worked he could have funded studies on them, but even he is smart enough to not continue to believe his own disproven bullshit that he feeds to conspiracy theorists.
You bought into the propaganda hook, line, sunk - all of your responses are exactly shallow narratives the mainstream establishment trained the general population with.
I'm not even going to bother linking to you to 5+ hours of testimony from various highly credentialed experts sharing their expertise as well as data, because you'll see a few of the names who have been demonized and had smear campaigns against them - and you'll then immediately and reactively dismiss the actual content of the video; there's also a 30-40 minute summary version of the video which is more easy to digest initially but I'd recommend watching the full version.
If you'd actually like to watch what I'm talking about then ask and I'll link it.
Do you think the tweets by King referred to in the article in the article are okay to make on Twitter just because someone has 10K other tweets?
>"A routine background check of King's social media revealed two racist jokes, one comparing black mothers to gorillas and another making light of black people killed in the holocaust
You're missing the point. Petty theft is bad but petty thieves don't deserve capital punishment. Similarly, those tweets are bad but King didn't deserve to be canceled for them.
Is it considered petty theft by all the victims of the latest racist mass shooting in NYand their friends and families?
King literally dehumanized Black women thus making it sound like its okay to kill them in cold bloaod and livestream it. There would be no deterrence for that if people didn't find it unacceptable.
By the same metric you should also not hold the reporter who revealed the racist tweets responsible for the actions of Anheuser-Busch and other companies. He didn't do the canceling.
Power propels cancel culture. Causing harm, pain, discomfort, whatever, to someone else gives people a feeling of power. Especially when they feel they have a righteous reason for doing so.
Cancel culture doesn't exist. People shun those they dislike. That's human nature. Entertainers are routinely cancelled for not being entertaining enough. Being morally objectionable makes people be disliked as well. The rise in prominence is due to two things: The permanent record that is The Internet and fake outrage from right-wing media. The same people who created the Hollywood black list for suspected Communists.
The story of the beer guy and the reporter who cancelled him and got cancelled is mostly fake. The reported did background as standard practice and found the racist tweets and reached out to the beer guy for comment. He never intended to play them up or make a case to "cancel" him. But the beer guy issued a proactive statement that the Register was targeting him which lead to an immediate and over-the-top counteroffensive driven by right-wing media. The anti-cancel culture missionaries look for any and every excuse to protect racist messaging, so they fight any and every attempt to shed light on racism.
It's not a culture. It's the human need for justice. There is a huge swath of legal but unacceptable behavior that will get you shunned. If you have a coworker who calls everyone in the office a moron that's protected free speech but you wouldn't be upset if they got fired.
>Alex Mazurek was terminated after homophobic comments on Facebook from 2014 were unearthed.
POLITicians are supposed to be POLITe.
>The Ontario Liberals are dropping their candidate in the Chatham-Kent-Leamington riding after comments he made on Facebook several years ago were brought to light.
There's basically no chance the liberals win in chatham. This has more to do with virtue signaling. "We are so virtuous that we would never let one of our candidates say homophobic things.
>In a statement posted to Facebook, Mazurek said the comments were unacceptable, but noted he was 13 years old when he wrote them eight years ago.
13 years old you said something mean? Cancelled!
What makes the NDP care what a 13 year old boy said? All people mature and get wiser since they were 13. What made the liberals go nuclear on a riding they have 0% chance of winning?
Yeah. I sure don't want to be judged by some of the things I said when I was 13, or even 20. I said some pretty stupid things. Did some stupid things, too.
> It's about saying how virtuous they are.
I agree; that's what they're doing. But isn't there some virtue also in not judging adults for the stupid things they said when they were kids?
There was a whole lot of right-wing driven cancel culture in the 1920's and particularly the 1930's and 1940's. It's not a right or left thing, it's just convenient to use whatever is at hand that generates the appropriate response.
Honestly, in my long time on this earth as a liberal, I see it completely the opposite. I see this latest generation of progressive left to be way more concerned about the culture war. At least in the US.
You’re free to not like or want these things to be codified in law but it’s still nonetheless the formula of how to turn mob rule into a dialog. Nobody is showing up to the house of a murderer with pitchforks anymore because we have a functioning court system. Factory owners aren’t having their door broken down by angry workers because we have labor laws.