Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you respond when a character from your top grossing game is turned into a political meme? This is what Blizzard has been learning this week. How do you handle potentially thousands of attendees, at your organization's biggest annual event, turning it into a platform for political protest agaisnt your biggest growing market? There's three possible events: BlizzCon is canceled. Extremely unlikely but possible. B…
This is a very awkward situation for blizzard, one they have ultimately created How do you figure they created it?
Blizzard Cancels Overwatch Event
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Re: Blizzard Cancels Overwatch Event
#92The huge question here is what's going to happen at BlizzCon in two weeks. There'll be 40,000+ attendees, cameras everywhere, there are usually Q&A panels, homemade signs for player support, cosplay, everything. How can you host BlizzCon when you're terrified of political speech?
I, and several friends, all have tickets. We're still deciding what form of protest will be most effective (too overt and the message gets quickly lost when security kicks you out).
Re: Blizzard Cancels Overwatch Event
#93The huge question here is what's going to happen at BlizzCon in two weeks. There'll be 40,000+ attendees, cameras everywhere, there are usually Q&A panels, homemade signs for player support, cosplay, everything. How can you host BlizzCon when you're terrified of political speech?
They are between a rock and hard place. It's a total no-win for them now. (Queue morbid curiosity.)
Re: Blizzard Cancels Overwatch Event
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a very awkward situation for blizzard, one they have ultimately created How do you figure they created it?
If they had just not done anything when blitzchung made his statement in support of Hong Kong, it likely would have gotten essentially zero media play.
Re: Blizzard Cancels Overwatch Event
#95The huge question here is what's going to happen at BlizzCon in two weeks. There'll be 40,000+ attendees, cameras everywhere, there are usually Q&A panels, homemade signs for player support, cosplay, everything. How can you host BlizzCon when you're terrified of political speech?
I, and several friends, all have tickets. We're still deciding what form of protest will be most effective (too overt and the message gets quickly lost when security kicks you out).
Re: Blizzard Cancels Overwatch Event
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you completely, but this whole debacle has highlighted what seems to be hypocrisy in the general public's reaction to this. Remember when The Daily Stormer got kicked off CloudFlare and a whole host of other platforms, to the point that no one would take their business and they were effectively censored? The average take on that seemed to be a mix of "Free speech doesn't apply to private companies" and "…
The difference is that a country which is committing human rights abuses is pressuring said private company (among _many_ others) to abridge free speech. The other case is a private company not wanting to host right-wing neo-nazi content of which the general public isn’t really accepting. I don’t see the hypocrisy here at all.. tbh I don’t even quite understand how you can conflate the two situations other than the f…
We've seen this all before with the "terrorist" label, the "communist" label in Hollywood blacklists, various Puritan attempts at censorship for sex, films, music, etc.
I wished I believed this much in our centralize opaque institutions to create these red lines consistently, reliably, and fairly. Which is amusing because much of the people pushing for this the hardest are often the same people who would never hand over such power in almost any other scenario.
The only reliable outcome, that we've seen repeatedly over and over in history is that once you start expanding censorship beyond just the obviously bad-guys (spam, violence, etc) and start wadding into the grey areas of speech is that:
a) context and intention, which are critical in day-to-day discourse, are increasing ignored as the system scales and the scope increases
b) the line will only keep expanding into a broader and broader group ("you did it for x, why not y?!!")
c) false positives dramatically increase
d) due process is only afforded in rare situations where the individual is already famous/powerful and can stir up enough controversy forcing the gatekeepers to actually consider it carefully
Everything goes great at the beginning as you sweep up the low hanging fruit. It's the long run where this 'solution' really gets tested - which is the phase we're now entering on many platforms.
Re: Blizzard Cancels Overwatch Event
#97deleted
To be relevant to the article, discussion will naturally center around the company at question. The connection of this particular article to HK is just too tenuous to have serious discussions about HK sprout up organically.
Re: Blizzard Cancels Overwatch Event
#98This is a crisis point for everyone who supports political free speech. Every corporation and business person is watching this to see which hurts their bottom line less, suppressing free speech globally, or angering China. As consumers, we must make sure that they get the message loud and clear that suppressing free speech globally on behalf of China is going to hurt their bottom line far more than China will. Otherw…
I agree with you completely, but this whole debacle has highlighted what seems to be hypocrisy in the general public's reaction to this. Remember when The Daily Stormer got kicked off CloudFlare and a whole host of other platforms, to the point that no one would take their business and they were effectively censored? The average take on that seemed to be a mix of "Free speech doesn't apply to private companies" and "…
Would it be correct to boycott CloudFlare for deplatforming the Daily Stormer? No, because there's nothing wrong with deplatforming Nazis, there was nothing morally reprehensible in Cloudflare's actions.
Would it be correct to boycott Blizzard for severely over-reacting to a pro Hong Kong political act on one of their streams? Yes, because apologizing to a monstrous, despotic regime by throwing tournament players and casters under the bus for supporting Hong Kong is morally atrocious. (As Brian Kibler and other professional casters have pointed out, some generic slap-on-the-wrist would probably have been appropriate, in line with what they would have done if someone took their victory speech to talk about impeaching/not impeaching Donald Trump or something).
This has nothing to do with free speech. I don't care about Blitzcheung or the casters' individual right to political speech on a Blizzard Twitch stream (it doesn't exist). I care about Blizzard's actions, and what they say about the willingness of the company to harm others to protect business interests in a despotic regime during a very important moment in global history.
I'm kind of confused about why you're confused, honestly. It's not very difficult to parse out very obvious essential differences between the two scenarios.
Re: Blizzard Cancels Overwatch Event
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did this sort of thing work out for the NFL, in terms of kneeling players? Pretty well, all things considered.
The NFL never took Colin's entire NFL earnings away from him on top of firing anyone commenting on the initial sitting. I'm pretty sure if they did this, there would be much more uproar than letting him do it and quietly not signing him onto any more teams.
Re: Blizzard Cancels Overwatch Event
#100The huge question here is what's going to happen at BlizzCon in two weeks. There'll be 40,000+ attendees, cameras everywhere, there are usually Q&A panels, homemade signs for player support, cosplay, everything. How can you host BlizzCon when you're terrified of political speech?
How do you respond when a character from your top grossing game is turned into a political meme? This is what Blizzard has been learning this week. How do you handle potentially thousands of attendees, at your organization's biggest annual event, turning it into a platform for political protest agaisnt your biggest growing market? There's three possible events: BlizzCon is canceled. Extremely unlikely but possible. B…