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Life after an internet mob attack

pasquale.cool

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Re: Life after an internet mob attack

#121

Post by nullc »

cousin_it wrote: post #11

If/when any of my friends get attacked by the mob, I hope I'll have the courage to stand by them publicly. A good recent test was the doxing of Scott Alexander. I signed the open letter against it with my real name and was happily surprised to see the names of many people I know. We should have more of these small but visible acts of resistance that let like-minded people find you.

One issue is that your friend would often not want your public support. You throwing yourself onto the pyre will not rescue them, only destroy you too. In many cases it would be symbolic-- and really just another example of virtue signaling, just like the mob but signaling a different set of virtues to a different audience.

Better that you stay employable so you can lend a financial hand if they aren't and protect your psychological health so you can be there for them in other ways.

So sure, pray for the courage to throw yourself physically in front of an unstoppable train... but also pray for the wisdom to know better. :)

Re: Life after an internet mob attack

#122

Post by [deleted] »

dvt wrote: post #3

The best solution here is to completely disconnect from social media or (at most) have an incredibly sanitized presence. Unless your job or livelihood revolves around needing to engage with a random internet audience (i.e. you're an influencer, entertainer, etc.) stay away from having a public persona on Twitter/Facebook/etc. The only community I interact with candidly tends to be this one. I don't post on Twitter, F…

[deleted]

Re: Life after an internet mob attack

#123

Post by wolverine876 »

dvt wrote: post #3

The best solution here is to completely disconnect from social media or (at most) have an incredibly sanitized presence. Unless your job or livelihood revolves around needing to engage with a random internet audience (i.e. you're an influencer, entertainer, etc.) stay away from having a public persona on Twitter/Facebook/etc. The only community I interact with candidly tends to be this one. I don't post on Twitter, F…

> The best solution here is to completely disconnect from social media

I've thought about that, but your reputation is being destroyed. You'll offer no defense? You'll let everyone who you value get that impression of you? You'll allow it to become permanent, public record for anyone who ever looks you up with a search engine?

Re: Life after an internet mob attack

#124

Post by drknownuffin »

lloydjones wrote: post #68
cousin_it wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My view is more like "a true friend would help you hide a body", or the short story "Friends in San Rosario" by O.Henry. If I abandoned a friend to the mob due to "screenshots of lewd DMs", I'd have a hard time living with myself afterward.

That doesn’t feel like a worldview that would result in a fairer society or better personal conduct. If defending a person, in the face of prima facie evidence, has the result of preserving their reputation and status (and keeping the reputation and status of the accuser in their original state) then it doesn’t feel useful or good.

I have a little kid. When we watch cartoons, they might point at the villain of the piece - e.g., Jafar - and say "he's a bad man!"

And I take the opportunity to nudge them and ask, "They did a bad thing. Does that mean they're always bad? Can they make things better? Should we forgive them? How do we know when to forgive them?" (not in a single tirade; these are just questions I drop over time.)

Because, in anticipation of the fact that they're definitely going to fuck up along the way, I want them to learn that mistakes and failures and even doing bad things don't make them irrevocably bad - that ultimately, the most important thing is making amends / trying again / etc. That your worst decision is not the sum total of who you are.

I don't see why I should try so hard to teach that to my kid, and then "disavow" friends who may have fucked up.

Re: Life after an internet mob attack

#125

Post by sneak »

rapht wrote: post #118

Cancel the mob: make platforms liable for publishing (or linking to) any accusations not established by a court relating to an individual's morals or ethics, except when those accusations are made by an accredited press organization. OK to call someone an incompetent, not OK to call someone a child abuser, or even just a sexist or a liar, except if you're making a stand as a media organization (which the accused indi…

There is already a mechanism for conveying liability to the publisher (not the platform, but the tweeter/poster, as it should be) when they publish false claims of fact (ie lies).

Re: Life after an internet mob attack

#126

Post by ipaddr »

numakerg wrote: post #38
dvt wrote: post #3

The best solution here is to completely disconnect from social media or (at most) have an incredibly sanitized presence. Unless your job or livelihood revolves around needing to engage with a random internet audience (i.e. you're an influencer, entertainer, etc.) stay away from having a public persona on Twitter/Facebook/etc. The only community I interact with candidly tends to be this one. I don't post on Twitter, F…

Having a following on social media has great benefits for regular techies, not just influencers and entertainers, etc. It lets you magnify your resume to reach people with authority who you normally couldn't connect with. It helps you get spots at conferences, seats on cool new projects or positions that you can further leverage to increase your online fame and bump up your compensation. You can also use your followi…

As a regular techie with a 16,000 person following you are not getting any of those perks. Your app will die. You may feel like you are raising a stink but a phone call would work better. Recruitors finding you on twitter is possible, submitting your resume ensures they have it is a better strategy. Making conference organizer friends on twitter or in person can get great conference speaker spots but not something the average developer does.

Re: Life after an internet mob attack

#127

Post by nice2meetu »

There is always another side to the story.

I was friends once with someone who I later found out had schizophrenia. She used to say horrible stuff about what other people had done to her.

Then came the couple of times some raging hot-headed guy would be banging on the front door of our house yelling at us and wanting to have a go because of the all the horrible things we had done to this poor girl..

It is amusing looking back but wasn't at the time, and it was scary how far people are willing to go even off hearsay.

Re: Life after an internet mob attack

#128

Post by rossdavidh »

The book "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" by Jon Ronson, is an excellent look at this topic. He interviews a number of people who have been the focus of such "mob attacks", and spends enough time on each to show how they happen, and what the long term results are. It's an oddly thoughtful and reflective look at thoughtless and unreflective behavior.

Re: Life after an internet mob attack

#129

Post by smlss_sftwr »

throwkeep wrote: post #43
polote wrote: post #24

There are a lot of talks on HN about the toxicity of social media. And people are pretty angry against Google and Facebook. But to me the worse is by far Twitter. There are plenty of random people who have a disproportionate number of followers compared to the quality of their posts. And as a result can do these kind of mods. Which are amplified by retweets, something that barely exists in other social media. Random…

I agree, Twitter is the most destructive of the lot. It drives mob behavior and low quality interaction like nothing else. It doesn't get as much scrutiny in the press though, because it's the home of journalists.

This is just a conjecture, but I think the 280 character limit on Twitter (or whatever it is now) is one of the key culprits behind the trend of deteriorating discourse not just at the societal level but even at a personal level. It's simply impossible to express nuance in a 280-character span and if you can't win over an audience within that limit, they'll just scroll past whatever else you have to say. Even if you personally have a more intricate perspective on the matter, you're forced to play by majority rules if you want to reach an audience and that quickly becomes a race to the bottom in a system that rewards whoever can come up with the best one-line mic drop instead of the best formulated ideas. I've noticed in my very limited experience with Twitter that it seems to drive "engagement" from opposing sides more so than Facebook's echo chamber, which is a breeding ground for confrontation (whereas long-form Facebook rants seem more so geared towards getting people on "your side" to egg you on). In theory our society needs that sort of cross-aisle engagement to reverse the trend of political fragmentation, but if all you have is 280 characters to make your case that just simply doesn't work. I wonder if there is a solution that could make it work, but given the trend of social media culture being driven by the lowest common denominator I'm inclined to think you'd need some sort of centralized moderating authority and that just brings us back full circle to traditional media outlets

Re: Life after an internet mob attack

#130

Post by kortilla »

craigds wrote: post #50
dvt wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oops, mea culpa . I mistook another screenshot in his post to be his own account. Yeah, 16k isn't that much; pretty sad.

> isn't that much 16 thousand people follow him. That's way more than enough to be considered a 'public person'

No, 16k accounts follow his. Of that, maybe a few hundred actually have users behind them that look at his tweets with any kind of frequency.
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