Telling people which causes they must publicly support or else be assumed an enemy? Does that ring any bells? I swear there's another regime in human history that made you hang flags outside your house to show your clear support. This comparison is made to death so I won't name it, but the similarities - despite accusations flying in the other direction constantly - are constantly increasing.

Removing TV shows from Netflix because somebody covered their face in black paint, with no regard for context or what was being made fun of it? (hint: it wasn't black people).

"Cancelling" somebody's career because their daughter said something that might be deemed racist? "Cancelling" somebody because they said something 10 years ago that might be racist? Absurd.

I honestly think our society is getting soft. You cannot disagree with somebody without them immediately deciding whether or not they can publicly shame you or if you broke any laws in the process of hurting them. Comedy is getting less and less funny, debate is increasingly meaningless because you have to tip-toe around everything. We are making society blander and less diverse in the name of diversity.

Diversity at all costs: except diversity of opinion.

We've always had local forms of cancel culture. But we've never had the digital weaponized mob mentality like we do with twitter/facebook/instagram/etc.

Now we have the ability to point to one incident which was recorded forever and can't be removed. Some things really should die out over time. The comments "most" people make should just, fade away after a while only being recalled in memory and allowing people to grow and get better over time.

Instead we have quotes from a 16 year old derailing their efforts to be a better human being as an adult.

We even get a similar kind of force here on HN, when a website gets blasted by being featured here. Website owners talk about being able to see that traffic.

Humans love seeing Karma in action and this seems to be evolution of that.

So not all politicians get cancelled for blackface.

[1]https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/01/politics/northam-blackface-ph...

Heck, we've already forgotten the certain prime minister of a Northern American country who escaped that fate, for similar reasons!

No one reasonable is going to run for office knowing there's a great chance their dirty laundry will be used to fuel the news cycle. It's not worth the risk; the possible damage to their family; and so on.

This is why so many of today's elected officials are as inspiring as the colour beige. No offense to beige of course ;)

Yes, Trump is an exception. But I said reasonable people ;)

I would imagine it's relatively affordable and easy for someone to scrape social media and store it all, forever.

Amen! Peter Thiel used to talk a lot on this subject. We’ve built a country upon the illusion of freedom. We are getting towards the War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength stage in society.

The scariest part is that the nation who will take the reigns next has no desire for free speech or diversity of opinion. Just as Rome crumbled from within we are doing the exact same.

I implore you all: when you vote this fall, vote them out. Put some fresh faces in offices. (1)Regardless of party. Send a message that the status quo is unacceptable.

1. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z99LXZai078

Not only that: stand in the way of cancel culture.

Commit to being an anger dampener.

Don't share outrage porn on social media, and flag it when you see it -- from either side.

Do like Monty Python. Whenever somebody you know starts chanting "Burn the witch!", don't outright disagree, and don't try to argue with facts and figures. Instead, ask them how they know she's a witch. Add nuance. Ask them to imagine how they would want to be treated if they were accused of witchcraft. And so on.

Reach out, in-person, to others, and encourage them to do the same.

Talk to people, in-person, with strong political views, and present counter-arguments to help them moderate.

Yes, this carries reputational risk.

Not doing so carries existential risk.

Free speech? Free thought isn't PC any more.

I think it always has been. :)

You are offering the other person a chance to convince you that they are right.

Maybe they even have a good argument! And you'd never hear it if you don't open yourself up to that possibility.

Just as importantly: you can't expect somebody else to be open to changing their mind, if you aren't open to changing yours.

I don't always succeed in this, and sometimes end up chasing rabbits -- did so elsewhere here, in fact. Other than getting in a bit of writing practice, it was wholly unproductive.

> People are so wrapped up in their echo chambers that _anything_ not in line with those "norms" is considered unacceptable.

True, but like Clausewitz said, war is politics continued by alternate means.

It's worth offending people and taking risks to avoid those alternate means.

I didn't see the questions are offensive patrern by keeping my mouth shut :)

This seems to be a strawman argument but even if this is unfair, I still have to wonder: "how do you regulate opinion?"

Opinion is not automatically speech, but it seems that even under the current 1st amendment notions if one expresses this opinion that it is "ok to kill people" then they are running afoul of the 'harm to others' condition.

I have never been to find a true absolutist on the matter of free speech -- I do not think they exist.

Wasn't that the main reason people voted last time? The status quo = the swamp.

Do they get out of hand? Of course.

Are we there now in the US? Compared to things like the French Revolution or the English Civil Wars; oh heck no. Compared to a gossipy Mennonite sewing circle; it's getting there.

Obviously we all want the crazy to go away and to get back to the business of living. How to do that though?

Don't feed the cycle.

Let the falling bobbin roll, do not try to catch the string and pull it out further.

Calm down.

I know that's hard. I know that the 'wrong' people keep on saying 'wrong' things. Easy for you to say 'calm down', Mr. Comfortable, your life wasn't just ruined. They destroy livelihoods and lives with their words. They deserve what they have coming for them, damnit! Justice!

There may be time for that in the future, but for now, we need to not inflame things. Shouting back is a whole lot better than shooting back, of course. But shouting tends to turn the cortex off and turn the brainstem on, so to speak.

If you want to be 'right', that's fine. But if you want to fix things and try to make things better, I would suggest listening more than writing screeds on people's FB walls. We know by now that does not work.

Are you talking about Kapernick being cancelled from the NFL by conservative cancel culture and the Vice President's staged NFL walkout to support conservative cancel culture?

it may detract from your central point, but it also explanis why one side of the spectrum won't be willing to contribute to an armistice

[0]: https://nypost.com/2020/07/02/harvard-grad-claira-janover-fi...

Her anger is the problem.

She was going to work with Deloitte, where she will represent her organization in front of clients that regularly sign off on invoices that resemble less a major purchase and more the GDP of a small country.

Imagine that you have a business.

Would you hire such an angry, callous, and impulsive person to represent you in front of clients?

Unless the name of your business starts with "B" and ends with "ank of America", the answer is probably "no".

Folks on the right are saying that she called for stabbing conservatives.

I don't think that's true.

She was using metaphor -- comparing being stabbed to having a paper cut -- and just did it exceedingly poorly.

The metaphor doesn't become clear unless you watch until the end of the video, and I don't know a lot of people, conservative or liberal, that are all that interested in watching the entirety of a video where they are being offered a complementary stabbing, just so that they can get the punchline.

If you post a video of you start off by repeating, over and over, "I am going to $VERB you", then don't be surprised when people interpret your message as, "I am going to $VERB you".

Finally: imagine that we flip her political orientation, and that she recored an angry video where she used a metaphor in which she talks about shooting BLM supporters.

She would likely be in jail.

There is a political difference in how both threats and actual violence are treated in the United States, and it favors the Left.

I think the progression is:

1. Make a political statement against an injustice (hashtags, kneeling, etc)

2. Making a lack of support a form of complicity with injustice.

3. Narrowly define what support looks like.

Exact quote from #ShutDownStem website: >> Unless you engage directly with eliminating racism, you are perpetuating it. [0]

https://www.shutdownstem.com/

  Kapernick made a political statement as his place of work

He ruined that 2010-14 dynasty and got his coaching staff and front office sacked. And then he goes for petty provocational crap like representing police as pigs on his socks. This is a guy who grew up in the lap of upper middle class luxury and wanted for nothing.

You can be a reprehensible human being and still have NFL success if you are top-level talent, but not if you are reprehensible and you suck.

Fantastic point. And I would hope those in favor of democracy can accept it. If you choose to support a political party publicly, you can reasonably expect people to engage with you about it. But nobody should be able to coerce you to support any particular party or candidate.

What we are seeing now, is not the freedom to choose a particular stance or cause. We are seeing the mob react with force to a lack of opinion.

You must have an opinion. And it must be the right one.

well, nobody is able to coerce you for not doing anything, but people can still judge you for it, and that may be perfectly reasonable.

Inaction can be as devastating as action. Withdrawing in the face of some injustice is as much of a choice as participating on either front.

It's an overused quote but really all that is necessary for evil to triumph is good people doing nothing. Of course today sometimes the causes are hyperbolic, but nothing is wrong with the principle. If someone is the victim of racism say, and people look away rather than stepping up, that's a failure.

It can be but rarely is.

In the case racism, it isn't. Sitting in my house doing nothing isn't as bad as attacking blacklivesmatter protesters.

The call against inaction is an exaggeration to shame people into action for their side. It's the "if you aren't with us, you're against us" repackaged for the woke.

Just one example:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/colin-kaepernick-socks/

I do not support what happened to Kapernick, I don't think cancel culture is any better when disguised as something else. But the scale at which things are happening now is insane.

As an individual, you should always have that right.

Both the New York Times and Breitbart are purveyors of propaganda for their respective political parties. They literally do nothing but make massively biased political statements, all day long.

Imagine you work there, and you disagree.

You can totally try to change that from within. Fight the system.

Work your way up. And once you have sufficient stature within the organization, you can run, say, an article praising George Washington on the front of the NYT, or a piece condemning him on Breitbart.

But, you, as a journalist, are a public face for your respective brand, and as such, you will likely face disciplinary action for going against the brand image.

It doesn't mean you can't make a statement.

But when you leverage your employer's platform to do so, there are going to be consequences.

Now, if you use your own megaphone, you absolutely deserve protection from being fired!

Build your Twitter/Instagram/Facebook following, and preach as much as you'd like. You built it. It's yours.

That's the reality of being a public figure. You are paid to be part of a brand image.

Tell me where I'm wrong on this. Or where you think we should draw the line. I'm happy to hear other opinions.

Every player standing and holding heart over hand during the anthem is doing the same.

There are no major fights for real progress... there's an enduring status-quo and the battlegrounds are empty and occasionally we entertain ourselves with token crisis or token fights that fizzle out as quickly as they appear - the duration of a tiktok video.

I think by 'softness' the OP was leaning more toward the idea of 'fragile' as opposed to 'weakness'.

As in: "prone to outrage" and/or "reactionary" .

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

FFS my roommate’s company banned custom emoji in Slack because some committee got trolled by 4chan into thinking :pepe: constitutes hate speech. I’m not making this up...

If you have an issue with your employer, find a new job.

> If you have an issue with your employer, find a new job.

I used to say that too. But there's a catch. Our government sets economic policy. Economic policy governs citizens' ability to find and obtain work, ultimately their ability to prosper. If the economic policy is "anything goes" then we will see and have seen rise of economic machines that suppress freedom of expression in the service of increasing shareholder value. The questions I think we should be asking is "does this make sense?" and, "have the goals outlined in the constitution been effectively achieved?". If government has enacted policy that yields an environment where people are not actually free to express themselves, is this not a failure of government to secure those basic freedoms?

I'd be a lot more comfortable telling people not to bother with oppressive employers if, for example, we had a concept of UBI so that people could feasibly sustain themselves in absence of a private economic machine writing their paycheck.

Here is some reading on this topic: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...

In short, I am aware of the status quo but I think interpretation is ripe for a modern revamp given trends over the last decade.

The interesting thing is that all those people in Twitter mobs that she's so upset about are also in an outrage cycle, hooked on Twitter.

The real hidden enemy here isn't political correctness, it's social media. It's the massive social experiment that no one signed up for, and it's driving us all insane.

That said, their effect on society hasn't been limited to raging twitter tirades. Companies, governments, and other institutions seem to be bending the knee to their outrage, which has led to not only our cancel culture, but to things like the CHOP situation which went on for far too long. Leaders are scared of making the mob angry.

Social media is the contemporary tool of spreading information, yes, but you don't have to use it to see everyone else around you lose their mind. Also, there are good things coming from social media too, and literally everyone in it signed up for it.

Sounds like you hold political correctness very dearly, but here's an interesting thought experiment for you. Try to imagine that just maybe, she may be right, and see if you can actually disprove it.

Writer of linked article claims to be a lawyer, but strangely seems unaware that the First Amendment protects speech and the press from the government.

No examples of government restricting free expression were given.

Private companies should not be able to moderate speech and claim to be a platform.

You're either a publisher or your not. If you're a public platform, your users should be protected by public laws.

For rhe most part the current state of affairs has worked so far but i would suggest it hasnt for some and is starting to show its weaknesses in a more polarized environment.

For the downvoters, this isnt some new opinion of mine because of the talking points from trump, ive had this view since the torrent debates of the early 2000s and other similar situations with people like snowden.

If you disagree because with what i have to say, please explain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

In particular, this either-or positioning was potentially the law prior to 1996 (following court decisions at that time). But legislators were concerned about what I've just heard Berin Szoka call "the Moderator's Dilemma", so they wanted to remove that obligation in order to avoid creating an incentive to never moderate anything.

At the time, it seems that they felt that we could have a wide range of platforms and forums with a wide range of moderation and editorial positions. Or even a wide range of forums within a platform with different moderation and editorial positions, like Reddit and the subreddits. It doesn't seem like that's held up super-duper well in various ways, but it doesn't seem like an unreasonable expectation or aspiration to me.

I would particularly like to push back on the idea that it's somehow obvious that everyone should once again experience this Moderator's Dilemma and have to choose between absolute neutrality and content liability, or that recreating this dilemma in its pre-1996 form is a good way to deal with editorial bias or with the impact of activist pressures on popular platforms.

I dont think its obvious.

Reverting back to the Moderators dilemma would put the onus of liability back on police and the law where these things csn be dealt with properly and fairly (so far as the legal system is our definition of fair.)

Since we can both submit to the fact that neither the moderators dilemma nor what we have today is very ideal, what would you suggest?

Fwiw my contention is likely that I simply think that falling back on the extreme that is the dilemma is the only option that actually has some consistency to it. I do not however ignore the fact that it comes at great cost. I guess im just willing to bear those costs more than the next guy.

Further disclosure, i think information wants to be free and that anything that prevents me from sharing 1's and 0's (whatever they form) along the pipes i pay for is problematic.

Laws are almost as arbitrary as moderation guidelines. And while they are democratically legitimised in principle, they are rather static by nature and absurdly unchanging due to current political dysfunction. The chaotic system of the current "court of public opinion" probably leads to an outcome that is far closer to the actual desires of a plurality of people.

The law also tend to divide content into sharp legal/illegal categories, whereas the more chaotic practice of differing moderation policies allows for a gray area. And that area is where some meaningful discourse could possibly happen.

Logically, moderational discretion happens only within the space of legal content. It is therefore, indeed, smaller than the maximum allowed by law.

But that is no different from any other group we participate in offline. At work, Thanksgiving with the family, or in some random store, we do not insist on being allowed to use the full spectrum of what's legal. If someone starts screaming obscenities in the theatre row behind you, they'll hopefully be escorted out.

This is where the true disagreement is. We can both believe in the constitution, in the first amendment, and in section 230, but I don't believe social media is a public space, because the person paying for the server is not the government. To me, these are very explicitly private organizations running web applications. For it to be a public space, it would necessarily not be limited in existence to the ability of a private organization to keep it running profitably.

Madison Square Garden is a private space, because someone owns it; it cost money to build, it costs money to maintain, there are finite seats, etc. The organization paying for the thing to exist has authority over the thing. If you want a public space, you can either create one explicitly, or petition the government to create a social media platform bound by the first amendment. It isn't Reddit or Twitter. Those are someone else's property.

Again, I have the opposite interpretation. If the government gives a private organization property rights, the government is the holder of power over society. The organization has authority over what the government gave it the rights to, and the government gave them the right (with section 230) to moderate their property in the way they are now.

I think we're in agreement.

Laws are not immutable which is what I'm getting at. We're past the "public" vs "private" debate, we're now debating whether to change laws and adjust which rights private organizations have - whether to adjust or repeal 230 entirely.

That's a great question, and I'm not sure I have a good answer to it.

> Fwiw my contention is likely that I simply think that falling back on the extreme that is the dilemma is the only option that actually has some consistency to it. I do not however ignore the fact that it comes at great cost. I guess im just willing to bear those costs more than the next guy.

I can appreciate that too.

The issue seems to be generally framed as "FULL CENSORSHIP" or "FULL ANARCHY NO MODERATION", with little middle ground considered.

The US already have a sort of line as to what it as a culture generally accepts as far as content goes, usually on sexuality (largely due to children). Here, the issue is then where to draw that line.

The key here, as far as I'm concerned is to allow for effective moderation of a community such that it maintains it's identity, but prevent the silencing of ideas and concepts. As such, a whitelist of moderation criteria for platforms may serve as a viable alternative. Said (non-exhaustive) whitelist for things that can be moderated upon would include: - Spam - Tone - Illegal content - Topic

Selective moderation would remain an issue, of course, but that's a fundamental issue as long as human moderators exist. Of course you also run into the issue of deliberate mismoderation, but then you can use the bat of loss of section 230 protection to hammer them then.

> The issue seems to be generally framed as "FULL CENSORSHIP" or "FULL ANARCHY NO MODERATION", with little middle ground considered.

With just a few exceptions, most platforms already seem to be somewhere in between now -- but it seems like the most popular ones also coming under more pressure to change some of the substance of their moderation.

> Topic

From what I've seen recently, I think this would be one of the most contentious to get people to agree on (including in particular the interpretation of what is "on topic" or "off topic"). I just recently read a thread about how hard this is where people were talking about the tendency of politics to creep into forums about hobbies, which some of the people involved wanted to find a way to avoid.

But that posed a lot of thorny questions... like

* what if some people feel like a certain political or social topic is obviously very relevant to a certain hobby or interest, but other people don't?

* what if some people want to make a critique of the hobby or interest or its associated community, but other people think the critique is mistaken or off topic, or don't agree with its premises?

* what if some people want to coordinate a defense of the hobby or interest or its associated community against a political or cultural attack? (e.g. we should fight this legislation that would be bad for our community, or we should coordinate a response to so-and-so who is badmouthing our community)

* what if some people feel that something is so important that it's inherently always on topic everywhere?

* what if some people mention their other views or affiliations in passing in a way that feels genuinely innocent to them, but that upsets other people? (e.g. they use an avatar that expresses some kind of political, social, or religious identity or some negative implication toward other people's identity; or they just tell a story that's like "while I was doing off-topic thing X, I had this on-topic thought Y")

* what if people within the community get in a fight that somehow seems to tie in to a larger social conflict?

* what if people want to have a meta-conversation about the best way of handling these issues?

* what if people feel frustrated because some off-topic posts (that are less controversial in some way) get treated more gently or indulgently than others (that are more controversial)? (e.g. Bob doesn't get in trouble for writing a 100-word anecdote on the cat fancy forum about his cooking, but Sarah does get in trouble for her 100-word anecdote about her political organizing)

* what if people disagree about whether historical or philosophical aspects of a primarily practical subject matter are on-topic or not? (what if some people feel that some of the historical or philosophical commentary is "really" thinly-disguised political commentary, because it implies that probably someone was awesome or terrible in some way connection with the practical topic?)

I don't mean to say that all ways of handling these issues are just as good as all other ways, but more that it's not always clear whether there's a meaningful way to define topicality -- or at least not that people would be able to agree on them easily.

I once had a personal experience of this that doesn't really relate to current events. :-) When Dmitry Sklyarov (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.) was arrested in August 2001, I ran an e-mail discussion list for people who were trying to free him. So far so good -- it seems like all of the subscribers were there because they wanted to free Dmitry and just wanted to talk about the best way of doing that.

But just a few weeks later, the September 11 attack happened, and immediately people on the mailing list wanted to talk about it, because it was such an intense and raw thing, and almost immediately they got into a fight about their views about the U.S. government! I was very anguished to have to be in the position of trying to force them to stop in order to get back to talking about the core concern of freeing Dmitry.

But of course the attacks were also on everyone's mind, and in principle they did have a lot of practical consequences for our goals, e.g. because it would be drastically harder to get press coverage, because relations between the U.S. and Russia might change as a result of the war in Afghanistan, because Dmitry himself might be alarmed to suddenly be surrounded by so much upheaval, because people's availability to protest about the DMCA might be reduced by their desire to deal with consequences of the attacks, because officials like Robert Mueller whom we were trying to influence might become preoccupied with a whole new set of concerns, etc.

I'm really not sure exactly what would have been either most fair or most useful in terms of what aspects of the September 11 attacks I should or should not have let people talk about on the mailing list.

Also right now there is a thread about LAEDA and EARN IT on another mailing list that I'm on, where people started talking about the legality of buying body armor, and about gun politics, and some other stuff. The moderator got annoyed and tried to get people to stop, but on the other hand these analogies aren't entirely irrelevant -- for example, some of the politicians who are going to vote on legislation about encryption might be influenced by lobbying and advocacy that tries to draw analogies or distinctions between encryption and body armor. Even though the list members may not be very good at discussing it constructively, it's not like there is no relevance at all of U.S. gun politics for U.S. encryption policy.

I was also in a thread just a few weeks ago here on Hacker News about "what topics are within the purview of public health?", and we found it very hard to agree about that. If Hacker News were about public health, we might have a huge ballooning disagreement about that scope question -- breaking out into public view pretty regularly.

The easiest one to handle first would be the topic-agnostic platforms. Those also tend to be the biggest ones. Facebook and Reddit as the bigger examples. For these, the answer is simple: Let users create whatever they want and apply rules however they want, but allow the rise of new communities. Perhaps a community forking system can serve as a countermeasure to network effects.

However, the key thing here for these platforms is that the platforms themselves are barred from impeding speech. The individual subcommunities and their respective leaders are not. As such, there's a clear line between the platform and it's community and subsequently the roles and responsibilities of each. After all, the key difference here is that between publisher and platform.

If I help an accident victim once, am I responsible for helping every accident victim? Why?

Facebook doesn't claim to be neither "platform" or "neutral ground" or "publisher", anywhere. There is no law making that distinction. It's entirely in your head!

It's a website. You may post. They may delete. You may leave.

If just one of their billions of users writes something bad about billionaire <y>, who then sues in a UK court and gets a Gawker-like verdict, Facebook suddenly owes them a a few million of whatever the local currency is.

Repeat for every single mistake of their team of moderators, and they are done for within 20 minutes. And so are Youtube, HN, and Google.

No moderation would lead to 4chan. Or, really, worse. Because even the chans all moderate to some degree, as far as I can tell. This would also be the end of any platform as we know it, obviously.

Therefore, you either don't even understand what you are arguing for. Or you somehow enjoy the idea of every single online community degrading to a constant stream of snuff videos and swastikas.

Where's the line (aka "Sorites paradox")? And who is making the decision?

You are allowed to moderare harmful illegal content, you are allowed to moderate spam, and other service breaking content. But kicking someone off because you dont like what they say is censorship.

Are you saying it is not censorship somehow?

Note, im perfectly fine with you moderating a private forum, e.g. behind a login wall.

But if you use the term "public" for visibility there is probably something wrong with censoring speech.

And yes, if you want to curate you are a publisher and are liable for the content.

If the laws around what liable means are a problem for the tech world maybe they need cleaning up a bit but i think some form of liability should be placed there anyway.

You dont get to shape modern discourse and then get to get off scotfree when everything goes pearshaped.

Moderation is absolutely censorship, and I should have every right to censor on a physical or digital platform that I own. If people behave in a manner I don't like in my physical business or on my private property, then I should have the right to remove them. If people behave in a way I don't like on my digital asset, I should have the right to remove them. Their use of my asset is predicated on my consent baring any other contractual details. If they don't like it, they are free to set up their own private enterprises with their own rules of conduct. Saying I am somehow liable for the content that remains is not reasonable. I shouldn't be liable for someone talking shit in my physical business, for a friend saying inflammatory things while in my private residence, for inflammatory conduct on a forum, or any other speech that is not my own unless I myself explicitly endorse that speech (with the exception of illegality that I know about). Me booting off person X while leaving person Y doesn't mean I inherently endorse person Y or agree with them.

I think potentially we need a third classification to indemnify private spaces of liability.

I still believe that public spaces should remain open, nuetral and unmoderated.

The world is a scary place, the laws dont line up between countries and weird scary shit will be posted online.

Im ok with this. Im ok with the internet being a place to explore our human psychy in its entirety.

I dont want it to be a nanny stated corporate friendly chopshop for ideas.

Basically any site with user generated content exists because the sites have been able to moderate their own content without having to assume liability for the content they do allow.

Several places have tried the full unmoderated thing and it seems to always devolve into shit as 'trolls' and edgy humor degrades into plain bigotry as People who don't like the edgy/extreme content leave and the remaining group becomes more and more extreme.

There's no way real to do forums, social media, or sites like medium or blogs without companies being able to host content without being liable for the content they're hosting that doesn't break the law.

That doesn't seem true or tragic at all. By your own admission it works it just fine in the literal sense, you just don't seem to like that it would cut into platforms you want to indulge in.

What becomes undesirable is things like front page recommendation systems and popularity lists that might now include inflammatory bubbles. I say boohoo, Medium won't get to actively leverage its sea of garbage authors as easily and reddit will have to let the sub-reddits market themselves, nothing of societal value is lost here. Discord style insulated communities become the norm and things move on. And the only casualties end up being shills for left leaning ideology like twitter and tech sector pets like forums that have little relevance to the mainstream.

The only reason the tech sector cares about handling this issue with finesse is because no one wants to admit that the industry actually does pander to one side of America's polarized system. That's a feature we as a community built for ourselves It's not a mystery why tech products and beliefs have ended up so homogenous, the industry increasingly homogenized as it congregated in a heavily political region. But if anyone calls that it they get labeled a bigot because that's SF and California culture in a nutshell and most professionals don't have time to deal with that shit so the dissenters just toss the line and collect they're pay.

It's no less evident when you notice that enthusiasm and support for whistle blowers only gained broad support in tech once they started targeting the American right. We as an industry are the problem but we've already allowed ourselves to become so polarized that no one is pushing back anymore because at best you get fired but manage to still find work. Most heavy criticism, such as whenever Google gets called out again and again, comes from outside the industry at this point. We built the rails while pretending to be cyber anarchists with no affiliations and then took our chance to ban the trains we didn't like because society couldn't see the implications of what was happening yet, we're the techno-authoritarians and we're no longer the ones qualified to talk about solutions for precisely that reason.

Maybe they shouldnt be allowed to operate?

Maybe this is why we cant have nice things.

Maybe, we need to come up with some other platform type where moderation is by the people for the people.

Regarding what we have now, its a dictatorship.

Ironically you'd likely need a more dictatorial platform to avoid censorship. You'd need a strong dictator to resist the censorship demands of the people. What we have now is a tyranny of the majority.

You can't however, walk into say a Burger King and not expect to get thrown out if you start making extreme statements.

The problem you've identified is social media platforms having power over public discourse. However I disagree that forcing website owners to host whatever their users want to say is a way to solve that. The real solution in my mind is for people to turn away from social media.

In other words, social media itself is the problem. Not the fact that social media inhibits free speech.

Publishers are liable. Platforms are not.

I simply want social media to get off the fence.

Because right now they sre misleading the public, telling them they can post whatever they want, and then flipping on them when it suits.

Nobody will turn away from social media until this is clear and understood.

If you defined facebook as a publisher, you will see a replacement valuing openness rise up within days.

Which would win is hard to say. Maybe people like being sheep. But at least this way they know what they are.

Everyone is liable for first party content, but not for third party content.

This was a point I tried to make when censoring extreme views / hate speech first started being a thing. While I’m vehemently opposed to said content, it’s a slippery slope once you start censoring. Everyone has their own opinions on what’s “bad content”, and while there is a lot of overlap in society, it doesn’t stay constant over time. I wish instead we’d form together as an industry and appropriately tag so you can then filter the web to your preferences. Sadly doubtful that approach would work in reality though.

Some will choose to be publishers, increase moderation, and also increase censorship and bias. If we introduce liability, they will be forced to remove even more content. Platforms would gain even more control over the content that users see.

Some will choose not to be publishers. We all know how bad the internet can get without moderation. I don't see how this would even be feasible with spam and illegal files/content.

Neither of these distinctions address the true source of power and influence for these platforms: the visibility algorithm. This is what has the power to decide elections. A platform might agree to never delete a Biden or Trump tweet/post, but what really matters is the number of users that actually see it, the relative placement in the almighty feed. And that is 100% up to the platform.

That amendment did not envision state level sized companies taking control of public discourse entirely.

Im weary of claiming the constitution needs a fix but at the same time it does have some fixes so its not infallible.

If your rebuttal to someone is to ignore widely-known idiom to focus on a particular detail that does nothing to undermine their actual point, please reconsider whether that was really a contribution worth making.

I see this response on HN almost daily now. For the millionth time: PC culture goes beyond the constitution's definition of freedom of speech. This is a cultural discussion. This is a discussion about how much power we have given to private companies (like social media giants and media production companies) over our lives.

I don't care that the first amendment protects me from government censorship, if my livelihood, the reputation of me and my family, and my future job prospects, can all be destroyed in an instant because of some outrage mob on Twitter. Why are people apologising because a few people on Twitter told them to? Why are people being fired because they made a tweet that wasn't supportive enough (or supportive in the right way) of the "correct" social causes?

Call it freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom to have an opinion. Whatever. But don't try and avoid the problem by pointing to the constitution as if that suddenly makes this all okay because "at least it's not the government".

I honestly rarely have seen this happen. There's almost always some other context to the story or the people who feel that they've been unjustly fired actually vastly underestimate what the impact of their statement was.

The reality is when you post on twitter with your name attached to it you are making a public statement that can reach thousands of people. Doesn't matter if you tweet from your toilet, you're reaching an audience that is larger than most people 20 years ago could ever dream of.

If that actually for some reason causes a PR shitstorm for your employer, you've damaged their business. This has always let to people being fired, this is not new.

Do you know how many local politicians or celebrities or public figures have lost their careers over a single sentence? A ton, there's nothing novel about it. Twitter gives you the opportunity as a complete nobody to reach hundreds of thousands within minutes. It's time people recognise they're not nobody's any more when that happens.

Well, I honestly have never seen actual witch burning happen. Yet I know it's wrong and it should not happen.

> If that actually for some reason causes a PR shitstorm for your employer, you've damaged their business.

Really? You know, I have huge doubts about this. What happens is that people are afraid of making an implicit statement by not taking an action, not of their business to be damaged. Huge companies are still made of people, and those people are afraid of being seen as making a statement that might damage them personally. But the actual risk of a business impact is almost zero.

Now that I think of it, kudos to Zuckerberg for having the balls to put a stop to this and calling out the bluff.

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

Note the "receive and impart"; it implies that people who want to receive speech of a particular worldview are entitled access to it even if a well-meaning majority think that it's bad for them.

[EDIT] Also note "freedom to hold opinions without interference" which stands in stark opposition to the commonly repeated bad idea that "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences".

And sharing an opinion is distinct from holding an opinion, and isn't protected.

>any media

Even then however, the UDHR doesn't imply that a particular newspaper must publish your view, only that you have the right to publish a newspaper.

Similarly, twitter need not publish you. You're free to create a twitter competitor though (and people have)!

Her central thesis is not that the first amendment should prevent the issues she is addressing from happening. The debate around what the first amendment does and does not protect is usually a diversion people use to avoid discussing the power that private companies have over our ability to express ourselves, and over which information is widely distributed and which is not.

It's not only the people on the other side of her argument who use the debate around what the first amendment does and does not protect as a diversion.

They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want private property, but they don't want businesses to decide how they do business?

I might not like how, say, Reddit moderates their platform, and openly express it, and even call for action on building better|decentralized|whatever platforms, yet I might also be ultimately in favor of protecting Reddit's legal right to do with their platform as they please. It's a nuance, not a contradiction.

Free speech is an ethic, an ideology, a deep part of our culture as Americans and essential to western enlightenment. It's a human right.

You don't have to agree with someone to think it's wrong to censor them. Corollary, you don't take away someone's human rights because they have an opinion you think is reprehensible.

History has a pretty damning record of what happens when societies allow silencing of undesirable voices.

One could say that social media has definitely accelerated this nonsense to new heights, taking everyone who disagrees with the PC-crowd underground.

The fault really lies in the companies, politicians, and media outlets who have given credence to what "the mob" on social media has to say.

Example: a comedian/author makes a tweet that is mildly offensive to some small minority, but they didn't mean anything by it, or it was just a joke. Somebody sees the potential to kick up a stink, and retweet it with "can't believe they just said this. apologise now". It gets maybe 10% the "likes" of the original tweet. A media outlet sees this tweet (some intern is browsing "latest tweets") and writes an article saying "Internet in an outrage: is x a racist?". Author immediately issues an apology, resigns from their job, and goes into hiding, their career destroyed forever.

What could have been done differently? The company they worked for could've stood by them. The author/whoever could have just ignored it. The media outlet could have had higher quality standards of publication. And almost nobody would even know what was said in the first place! Our society thrives on conflict, and any small hint of a conflict is blown up beyond all proportion.

Similarly, "why blame social media when we haven't shed the desire to witch hunt?"

The red scare (and other witch hunts throughout history) worked pretty well without social media.

Hard to compare and say that this time is worse. The other witch hunts though history seem pretty bad too.

Let me tell you about Usenet, especially pre-Eternal September …

> But despite his killer getting fired and arrested, the protests became more violent, more destructive, and more divisive.

A lot of rioting and violence came in the early days, even before the arrest and murder charges. The vast majority of protests were peaceful. And this seems to insinuate that the protesters and rioters were the same people, which I don't think is a widely held belief.

And maybe the protests are about more than just the murder of George Floyd... If this was an isolated incident, maybe expectations of a quick return to civility would make sense, but it's almost like people (including white people) are tired of this happening.

> If you aren't posting #BLM, you’re racist. If you ARE posting #BLM but you say it in the wrong way, you're racist. If you're white and you're silent, that's violence. If you're white and you're speaking up, you're talking over black voices and only they should be heard.

Maybe this is several folks trying to take the culture wheel. The debate is messy right now and that's OK. It's a messy topic and people are tossing out their ideas.

If you want to post #BLM great. If you don't that's fine too. I'm glad we're having a conversation about it even if it's just to simply say we're all confused.

Props to the author for sharing her views. If folks take issue with what you've said, don't sweat it. And if you're looking for other folks on direction on how to "do it right", you're looking in the wrong direction.

Anecdata: in a company all-hands 2 weeks ago, an employee asked the CEO why the company hadn't yet made a public statement about BLM. The CEO looked visibly agitated, almost fearful, and stumbled through some response that equated to "will we do that by the end of the week".

Whether or not the pressure actually exists, people are scared of what will happen if they don't conform. People have been fired over tweets, roasted in the media over not speaking out "when they should", and for things they said 10 years ago. Nobody wants to be on the front page of buzzfeed for being outed "as a racist". There is a collective societal fear that is driving us faster and faster off the PC cliff.

I sometimes worry about anything I may have said years ago or anything I say now that could be construed as offensive by ... almost anyone at this point.

Early on (day after the riots started) I posted an article about a POC business owner’s business being destroyed due to protests (rioting) - I had someone call me gross and “where was your outrage when a Black man was killed by a cop? I didn’t see you post anything then”

After that I started having to make a risk analysis before doing anything.

At this point you HAVE to say something about everything and cover your bases, or you’re complicit; oddly enough you can say something AGAINST the movement, be called out, and apologize, and that’s acceptable. But trying to stay out of the shitstorm? No, you’re complicit. Say something positive, or say something negative and then retract it. But say something...

I hear this complaint a lot and don't quite understand it. I don't think the goal in life is to not offend anyone. Just live your life as best you can and if others get offended that's OK. Learn from it if you want to, if it's nonsense ignore it. If someone injures you, sue them. If someone threatens you call the police. If someone stops being your friend get new friends. People are free to get as offended as they want and you're free to not let it bother you.

When there are laws passed that create penalties for offending someone then we have a problem. Until then the outrage about the outrage is just like the outrage itself.

It's the exact opposite of the norms that the United States had been built on for it's history. And there's little to no legal recourse for victims of the mob who have been fired from their jobs and labeled as a racist online.

Unfortunately, something within us seems to want to blame, shame, control and punish other people.

You're just realising that, though a much more extreme case than usual.

But things have reached epic levels of mob mentality. I could post something about someone raping someone else, completely bogus, and it would spread like wildfire, with people making memes of it who have zero knowledge or context.

If I was the CEO I'd say that I personally support and strive for equality and mutual respect. And as CEO I'm focused on changing the world though [our product].

I'm sure that wouldn't satisfy some folks but that's OK. There's only a Catch 22 if you're trying to make everyone happy. If you're OK with some folks bring upset then there shouldn't be fear in questions like the ones you mentioned.

The far-left radical progressive movement is different and has greater power and momentum than anything we've seen in the past two decades. Aside from destroying the reputations of a few truly bad people, we've seen them attack rational speech, deny biological realities, ingrain the perception of racism into innocuous encounters, unironically apply blatantly racist viewpoints towards white people, denounce any form of logic or reasoning as racism or sexism, and so much more.

Your tepid response tells me you're not aware of the scope of this movement. It co-opts the good will of normal people and redirects normal liberal and progressive tendencies into something truly destructive.

If you're tuned in to what's happening in universities, companies, workplaces; the pattern is hard to miss.

The movement works on forced compliance, humiliation, denouncing logic, attacking perceived racism with actual racism.

None of this is right and so many people and companies are going along with it. Most people are taking these movements at face value and want to do the right thing. Companies are pre-emptively capitulating to future demands because it's good for business.

If you express nuance you're instantly and overwhelming branded as a racist or sexist. There is no room for thought or reason in this movement unless it points to a narrative that white men are evil oppressors.

This isn't really about one man being murdered by a cop anymore, or even about racism in general. It's about a cult of victimization leveraging offense and outrage to oppress anyone who gains a modicum of public success in society, and the justifications by which they're acting defy the bounds of reality.

The movement represents a greater risk than racism or sexism, it destroys the individual, eliminates free speech and thought, and coerces normal, kind people to say and do things which go against our most basic intuitions.

The irony of this juxtaposition - bemoaning lack of nuance, then immediately following it with an utterly un-nuanced broad-brush statement - is quite impressive.

This is a movement that operates on fear, paranoia, and coercion under the guise of equality. Without fear and coercion, it has no legs whatsoever.

A bunch of people have died under police brutality.

And the list of grievances goes on..

People are sensitive to different things. But there is some irony in all the outrage about outrage culture.

I'd be more upset at the folks in power that make the decisions than the folks on Twitter pressuring them.

How are ideologies like systemic racism which inform its followers to view all encounters in the lens of racism, and that we should all act in accordance to the idea that racism is inherent in all of us, going to bring about net good change in society?

These ideas are absolutely backwards and will drive us backwards from the hard-fought progress of the past.

Racism is an issue, but it's improved drastically from the past. Entrenching the idea of racism into all encounters can only deepen the issue of racism. It erodes the idea of the individual, the American, and places racial identity foremost as to the quality of your personhood. If you only read some of what's been written as the foundational teachings of this movement - the origins of systemic racism, writings like White Fragility, the bare insanity is there to see - it has zero contact with reality. And these ideas are coming to life by humanities students and activists.

The value of the Evergreen story is that the pattern has emerged across the country and spread like a virus into higher education and soon into private corporations. Evergreen is a dying college now. No parent wants to send their child to an institution which places merit far below sexual or racial identity. Yet the administrators cling on, doubling-down on decisions representing an inverted ideology. The same thing, if the ideas of this movement are taken to their logical conclusion, will happen all across America in its knowledge centers.

I’ve noticed how this “You take away my free speech when I get backlash when I speak some idea that is now interpreted as X-phobic or harmful” argument seems to pop up among during movements that cause painful resistant power shifts.

also this....

“Personally, I think adding trans performers would breathe life into Drag Race. But I’m a viewer, and I don’t get to decide that. The point is that RuPaul’s Drag Race is RuPaul’s show, and we don’t get to scream and cry and throw tantrums until he changes his own show.“

.... but what about free speech you were just arguing for?

why don’t people get to scream and cry?

This appears to be conservative grief masked as liberally tolerant protection of free speech.

I know that legally free speech protects you from the government and not everyone else, but personally I agree that 'free speech' is more than just the legal definition.

why don’t people get to scream and cry?"

The article says - we don’t get to scream and cry and "throw tantrums until he changes his own show."

The point is you can cry and Express your free speech, but not not expect someone to change their creation.

If you think your point is valid, create something of your own. Why should a creator cater to every person who takes offense.

I am also free to respond however I'd like, and in some cases there may be many more people that share my opinion rather than yours!

I also think there is genuine psychological harm being done by mobs online. This is not so hard to see in other contexts, where it would be called bullying or harassment. Consider the cases of high school students publicly informing on their peers and denouncing them. Unfortunately, for political reasons people are trivializing that right now and acting like it's no problem at all, just everyday communication and no one has a right to expect different. That's ironic since I assume most of these people would say that they believe in a politics of empathy.

I also think that, contrary to a common objection, there is a genuine free speech issue with denying access to the social media platforms which have grown so large as to become de facto standards for public communication. It's popular right now to say "it's not a free speech issue because they're not the government". But Facebook, Twitter, etc. are the public squares of our time. Private institutions that become that large and monopolistic begin to encroach on the public sector in importance, and it's too legalistic an argument to say that doesn't count because e.g. the first amendment only applies to the government.

Those are three areas that go beyond just expressing disagreement with someone, and have elements of actual harm in them. Also, all three are escalating and the logical next steps are worse.

sometimes repercussions greater than disagreement is warranted, and psychic injury to usher in real, positive change is a small price to pay, smaller than during most prior evolutions.

but let's spell out clearly that the complainants are largely folks who want to assert power as privilege on minority groups and are meeting rightful resistance. it's true that sometimes the resistance goes too far, which is unfortunate, but that's a non-sequitur borne of an imbalance of perception, entitlement, and extra-sensitivity.

that's the nexus of the clash, and a key part of why it just won't be civil and orderly. this is the internet era's version of a power struggle. feet are gonna get mashed and we're not gonna like it.

you're missing some of the nuance, the asymmetry of cause and action, though. there is already historic, perpetual violence, acting to subjugate and disenfranchise, and it's quite understandable and reasonable to resist that subjugation.

the resisters weren't initiating this thread of violence but rather had it thrust upon them. the initiators activate the risk of injury on the rebound, not the resisters. no initial violence, no rebound injury risk.

asserting dominance is risky business, no two ways about it.

Personally, I think this is a phase because people will quickly learn that they're just alienating people further. Real, open discussion promotes better understanding for everyone.

There is never a case where the actions of an individual warrant an angry mob.

Never.

That is the test of morality. Not how well you treat your friends, but how you behave towards the most vile and despicable people in existence. Unquestionable evil.

Stalin. Hitler. Mao. The worst and most horrible criminals.

All of them deserve a fair trial for their crimes, and equal treatment under the law.

Not because we are being "soft" on them.

But because we are better than them.

GP was using "angry mob" in the twitter sense. An angry twitter "mob" isn't going to murder you. That doesn't mean people never deserve to be deplatformed or fired. And those things (rightfully) don't require a trial.

It's my fellow human who wants me to lose my livelihood because I disagree.

People think "calling HR" is some kind of loaded weapon, but the fact is there are harrassers and all sorts of losers who get called to HR over and over and keep their jobs. HR exists for one reason: protect the management. If you're expendable and easy to fire, then _maybe_ they'll can you, but if you're actually a decent employee they definitely won't if all we're talking about is a brush fire on Slack.

The mobs on Twitter frequently cross over into committing mass acts of criminal behavior through threats and intimidation, organizing to harm people. They don't hide it, this criminal behavior is all out in the open. Hurt this person next, no no no hurt this person. Threatening to harm people is violence (it doesn't have to be a physical threat to be violence), not freedom of speech.

Anonymity was easy for regular folks back in the 2000s.

I'm actually baffled at how some people so willingly express their personal views online these days.

"... the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

Privacy and free speech are quickly eroding and it seemed like not many people are willing to get loud about it.

A breast on TV sent America crazy. A woman breast. Sorry, a n%%%ple. Most of people had one right in front of their eyes at some point in life. Or their mouth, which is disgusting enough to have women cover their breast when breastfeeding.

I am French. Our culture is way more aligned with normality than others when it comes to fuck, fucking and breasts. But even here, when I compare to what we had as teens in the 80's,I have the impression that today we are back in the middle ages.

I resuscitated my old neglected Twitter account recently. It stressed me out and felt addictive, so I quit.

It turns out that if you're not on Twitter you don't hear that noise and it doesn't affect you.

If you avoid twitter and facebook and anyone that interacts too much with those things, you'll see a lot less of this stuff and probably be a lot happier.

Up until more recently, it seemed the majority of folks on the internets felt they were obligated to let their freak flag fly.

So color me confused.

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Or at least give Jonah Goldberg credit for Liberal Fascism, written over a decade ago.

Following the obligatory comparisons to 1984 for being cancelled out of the network-tv drag queen tv show community, comparisons to the Soviet Union followed promptly.

As someone who had family in East Germany let me tell you what Soviet cancel culture was. Being thrown into a dungeon where the light doesn't shine or someone being shot in the head by a Stasi agent.

Extremely bored people being cancelled out of some community by other extremely bored people on the noise generating machine that is social media is about as much Soviet Union as Trump fearing STDs was his Vietnam.

This reminds me of the valiant defenders of the intellectual dark web, which is so dark that it seems to occupy the permanent topspot on every podcasting service on the internet

And while they're effective tools, they are rarely applied at scale, for the simple reason that if too many people are dead or imprisoned this will be both counter-productive and risky for the regime. Purges notwithstanding, of course. Instead the tools they apply at scale are fear and indoctrination, to the point that the people aren't sure any more what is sane, right, just. To the point that even if they manage to keep their sanity, their spirit is broken and wouldn't dare question the status quo even with their friends or family.

This is the great sin and corruption of tyranny, it smothers free thinking, the mind and the soul. Modern totalitarian governments have become even smarter and only use physical violence surgically, instead relying on other subtler measures.

Which brings me to my point: you're now relaxed and confident because no one's imprisoning or killing people for their opinions. They're only getting fired, having their reputations or businesses destroyed, etc.

You're focusing on the tools instead of the effects - people are being confused and unsure about what it means to be a good person and they're afraid to express their thoughts. I doubt that Americans will be facing Soviet Union conditions anytime soon, but you're on the path of having free thinking squeezed out of you and this is why many of us are alarmed.

We're not talking about factory workers being cancelled by the communist party for not spying on their neighbours, we're talking about a bunch of upper-class professionals being cast out of the intelligentsia, which annoys them a lot. As the saying goes, "the conflict is so fierce because the stakes are so low". But this is not the Soviet Union. Not even as a metaphor.

The entire cancel culture debate is in itself extremely limited to the kind of people who are overly online. Nobody who is flipping burgers or driving Uber is being cancelled, because they don't have an audience, or the time to waste and probably the good judgement to waste their time like we do

I don't think it actually matters at all, it's like the Seattle autonomous anarchists. It's all simulated outrage. Ezra Klein points out in his book on polarization that the US was much, much more violent during the 60s and 70s, when there was very little polarization or cancel culture. Just count the number of political assassinations or compare riots then to today.

Today is peaceful by comparison. Reactionaries haven't turned around acceptance of gay rights yet, cancel culture hasn't cancelled the conservative judiciary yet and ushered in the red guard. Very little has materially changed, it's almost all pure spectacle, if anything a distraction for actual change. You see how much Zucc cares about being cancelled? Anyone remember occupy Wall Street? Maybe cancelling is at an all time high because of how little it actually does.

Perhaps not the best example. Two people have been shot and killed in the CHAZ, one of them a 16 year old boy who was killed by CHAZ 'security forces'.

On the other hand, you are minimising the problem here. Getting "cancelled" is just one possible consequence of the... let's call it Twitter PC Mob Culture. Other frequent consequence is people getting fired from their jobs -- and that can easily happen to a burger flipper or Uber driver.

Both are essentially the same thing: attacking someone's livelihood as a revenge for expressing an unorthodox opinion. It's just, if someone's sole source of income is their paycheck, you get them fired; and if they also make some extra money by giving lectures, you also get those lectures cancelled. Sure, if you only focus on the part about cancelling lectures, then yes, that part only happens to those who give lectures, of course.

How high are the stake of losing one's job? Depends; some people find a new job easier than others. If something like that happened to me now, it would be quite inconvenient. But suppose I would be lucky and find a new job overnight; would it mean that getting me fired was no big deal?

If we talk about individual victims, of course we are likely to mention the famous ones. If I tried to name a cancer victim other people know, I would probably say Steve Jobs -- not because he is a typical cancer victim, but because he is a cancer victim I expect other people to know about. Also, him being famous is precisely why I know about this fact. So, if we try to discuss victims of Twitter PC Mob Culture, of course someone like Eric Weinstein is very likely to be mentioned. But that doesn't mean that the threat is limited to people like Eric Weinstein. It just means that if the same thing happens to me tomorrow, you will probably never hear about it.

Somehow folks have gotten the idea that it's ok to scream "Fuck You!!" at the top of their lungs in public or on social media if the victim is perceived to somehow be mildly racist for instance. And the entire cancel mob is impolite and unmannered. No charity, no nuance, no stopping to think or consider what is being said. Just rabid mouth frothing.

And really racism itself is impolite. It makes others feel bad for no good reason. It's anti social. So is sexism. It's extreme impoliteness and dis-consideration of others.

Ya, we get it, we should have the legal freedom to be impolite. But good people just shouldn't do it. For most any reason. We can always invent excuses why we should be disrespectful to others.

It seems the media really got on this trend early with a lot of right wing folks starting with Rush Limbaugh and progressing to Glenn Beck and Nancy Grace making an audience out of shouting and saying rude things in an attempt to be edgy. The current crop of protesters out screaming obscenities at police officers and the general public seem to have taken this to it's (hopefully) final conclusion. It's like a scene from "Idiocracy" really. And the current president is right in there, he's made an election platform out of impoliteness.

I've been listing to a lot of free audio books from the late 1800 and early 1900's. The amount of general politeness and manners exhibited from people was amazing. So different. It's too much for the current era, but I'd be ok if we went back to a little respect and courtesy of others in general no matter what someone thought or did or believed and this became custom once again.

If you were the same class, race, etc., sure. Not if you were a slave, a servant, a woman, a child labourer, a poor, or any one of a huge range of "lesser" peoples.

I was talking with a friend who was complaining about a political party lying. She went on about her party that had to lie to combat her opponents. That she had to “play dirty“ in order to succeed.

I think this is wrong as having the moral high ground is important, especially in politics and ethics. Because if the only right is “what we think” it gets to be hard to convince people who aren’t we.

But I've found one of the best sources is YouTube. Tons of readings of out of copyright books and you can usually pick a narrator you like.

The more toxic parts of cancel culture are a problem yes, but to blame the left for Netflix deciding to remove episodes they shouldn't have removed is just silly, especially when the vast majority of people on the left don't agree with Netflix in those cases.

I'd argue that the part complaining about "the liberal media" is even more applicable to right-wing media. What she's complaining about has been done by Fox News and Murdoch owned tabloids for ages now.

And I have a very hard time taking anyone who recommends PragerU seriously. PragerU is an awful and dishonest propaganda outlet and should be treated as such. The fact that someone who claims to be pro choice, pro LGBTQ, and pro environmental issues would even claim that PragerU is "rational" makes me seriously doubt that person's judgment.

Honestly, the idea of abandoning your social political viewpoints just because you think that some people on the left are mean is a really dumb way to go about deciding your political opinions and who to vote for. It's reactionary and inevitably leads to putting more shitty people in positions of power.

You should stand for your beliefs even if that means having to agree with some dumb-asses.

---

For a view on cancelling from someone on the left, and talk about experiences with it, I can recommend Contrapoints' video on the subject [1]. It's long but worth a watch if you want to hear someone talk about it who doesn't just suggest that people abandon the left and vote against their interests.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...

Eloquently worded.

The biggest is that they have, quite intentionally, encouraged the spread of outrage and mob mentality all across the political spectrum. These companies have installed levers for manipulating their users emotionally, and these levers are for sale. You can even fiddle around for free if you have the time, or get (un)lucky!

Oppressive PC culture, that can manifest as an almost Puritanical form of moral authority, spreads quick on social media. As someone who grew up in conservative, small-town America (and rebelled against it every chance I got), I'm not about to have my opinions dictated to me by the new boss either.

If your social sphere is mostly composed of middle & upper class, highly educated professionals, you might just feel surrounded by PCness. If you have any connection to the white poor and/or rural however, you also know that right-wing authoritarianism and racism are boiling too, with lethal results. As far as PC culture can be viewed as a defensive response to racism, I think it is clearly the lesser of the two evils, but it's probably a false dichotomy.

Instead what I see is fear of 'cancel culture', the fear of BLM being a bunch of secret marxists (ironically she should be advocating for their right to freedom of speech as well, but it seems that marxists are more scary than nazis) and a bunch of links at the end to people who have done their fair share to either stifle free speech or cancel people on their own.

She even links to Andy Ngo who is a known liar and provocateur and has even himself encouraged violence against people he disagrees with. Frankly I'm disappointing this article is even given a millisecond of anyone's time of day.

This is what someone who she links to (known nutball Scott Adams) said YESTERDAY.

But this is totally a good faith article that we should all read and absolutely belongs on top of a serious discussion forum like HN. Yep.